A Guide to Poster Designing

1. A Guide to Poster Designing

2. Planning Your Poster Before you rush to your computer and start designing your poster, there are a couple of things you need to do first. Planning your poster is extremely important. Designing a poster is a challenge because space is limited. It must be lean and clean, standing alone if you are not present, and gain attention as audiences come and go.

3. Planning Your Poster • Start by writing down everything you would like to have on your poster, keeping in mind who your target audience is. • Draw your poster on a piece of paper, adding all the different sections and headings you would like to cover in your poster as well as the text. Let someone proofread for grammatical and spelling mistakes.

4. Content To select the content for your poster, you must cull the most essential information from the wealth of knowledge you've gained. It's psychologically hard, but you can't use EVERYTHING. You want to select the crucial support for your Profiling Subject. You can rank the information into three categories: • MUST know (to get the point) • Good to know • Nice to know You should include the “MUST”, add some “Good”, and save “Nice” details for talking with your audience.

5. Creating Coherence It’s easy for your audience to move from one section discussed on your poster to another and to see the relationships between them. Create coherence by carefully planning the arrangement of information by relying on what we know about how readers read. Since English-speaking readers read text from left to right and top to bottom, use this pattern to inform the arrangement of information in your poster.

6. Other Useful Tips • Eliminate any poster "noise". Remember you have less than 3 seconds to draw the attention of your audience to your poster. Poster noise happens when you add irrelevant or unnecessary information to your poster. • Have some attention grabbers on your poster. Seeing that you don't have a lot of time to get the attention of your audience you need to make a quick impact, e.g. a catching and interesting statement, photographs, graphics, colours, layout, etc. - all of these play a role in attracting your audience.

7. When you have finished your final design on paper, you can start designing it on the computer. Other Useful Tips • Headings of the same level of importance should be in the same size and type of font. All labels should be legible from at least a metre away. • Colour can “make or break” a poster’s legibility and aesthetic appeal. Incorporating colour appropriately in a poster display means choosing and using colour purposefully. Use colour to show: (1) which elements go together (are similar in value or are related in topic). (2) which elements differ.

8. 69cm 89cm Student 4 Student 3 Student 2 Student 1 Your drawing might look something like this:

9. 69cm 89cm Student 4 Student 3 Student 1 A3 A3 A3 A3 Student 2

10. Revenue Territorial Market share Branding Customer Etc. Trends 69cm 89cm Student 3 Student 1 Don't Know! To find out. You Know! • Your title, name, school • Background • Objective/s Highlights: • SWOT analysis • Challenges/Solutions • Strategic issues A3 A3 To Know! • Analysis, applications, conclusions of your profiling • To include - • Personal Reflection: • If I am the CEO, what strategies would I be implementing? Findings: You can switch the positioning Of “Findings” & “Highlights” Your Learning! Examples: For Co/Ind/Prof: (Graphics/ Histograms) A3 A3 Or a combination of: Upper panel:Mostly Text-based. Bullet Point Form recommended. Must capture viewer’s interest/attention in seconds. Good to include Logo/diagrams/charts but avoid lots of Photo Pix. Student 4 Student 2

11. 69cm 89cm Student 3 Student 2 Student 1 Lower panel: For PIX, bibliographies, references. Recommended PIX: highlight processes, activities, etc. Avoid static PIX. Panel for your creative arts Student 4 A3 A3 Keep bibliographies, references visible but small in display! A3 A3