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One or two tips to make me like your poster

One or two tips to make me like your poster

By: Priscah Lakane

Have you ever come across a poster that you were amazed by and thought “that is the best poster I have ever seen”? What attracted you to it? What did you like about it? See, I have never come across a perfect poster. Yes, I have seen posters that were good but when I paid more attention to them there was always something lacking. Something that does not make them get to the “perfect” line.

Growing up, in our Arts and Culture class, we were told that whatever poster we made it must be creative, colourful, have lots of pictures and the writing must be large enough to read. I do not remember the last time I made a poster though,  I think I was still in primary school if not early high school. Bear in mind back then we had to draw or write whatever it is that we wanted to be on the poster BY HAND! Now, imagine having to come up with a whole new heading style that you need to write with free-hand and still try to make it attractive to your audience. What a mess that was. Somehow there would be some students that would actually make really good posters (not me). I knew they were good posters because I could not stop staring at them. I would admire the heading, the design, the use of posters, how pretty it was and sometimes, sometimes I would admire how well the poster relayed the message.

I will tell you what makes a good poster, for me. Firstly, it is important to note that a good poster will depend on who the audience is. An arts poster will be different from a science poster, just as a poster for pre-school kids is different from a poster targeted at young adults. Art posters are usually artsy whereas science posters tend to have the “scientific method design”. I dare you to search for a science poster template on the internet and I promise you 90% of the templates that will popup will have a design that has an introduction, methods and materials, results, discussion, conclusion and references. If you pay more attention to scientific posters you will notice that most of them are just a copy and paste of their research papers. Although the scientific method design poster let us know what the research is about, they can be… boring. There are other creative ways to make scientific posters and present your research than the typical design.

A very important aspect of a poster is the writing. The heading is one of the first things that a reader notices therefore they should be able to read it from at least 2 meters away. Also, the rest of the writing should also be big enough to read from at least 1 meter away from the poster. Also, pay attention to what needs to be emphasized, like your name for example, that needs to also stand out from the rest of your writing.

Another thing that makes a good poster is the use of space. How do you use the poster space? Do you just fill up the whole poster with word or with pictures? How do you present different ideas or sections? These are very important questions to consider when making a poster. You do not want to fill your poster with writing but also, you do not want to have a lot of unnecessary pictures on your poster. Only put pictures that are necessary to tell your story.

By now you should be having an idea of what a good poster looks like. Let us recap –a good poster has to have a great design, a good poster has readable writing and a good poster uses just the right amount of writing and pictures. One thing I realized when our class did an exercise where we all went around looking at posters and writing down the goods and the bad about the posters we have seen is that, the idea of a good poster is a bit different from person to person. One person might not like how a picture was used and another person might like the use of the picture. Making a poster is actually very difficult now that I think about it (insert thinking emoji here). I am yet to see a perfect poster, I would like to see that one poster that I will look at and think “this is perfect, there is nothing more or nothing less the person that made this could have done to the poster”. The day I come across such a poster, I will definitely write a blog about it. Till then, the search for the perfect poster continues.

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