Posters are an effective means of sharing what you have learned via your ENVS situated research: they can readily be displayed as hardcopy, and electronic versions (saved as PDF or PNG) can be shared online. Posters are commonly used to communicate research results in the natural sciences, sometimes used in the social sciences, and not used too much in the humanities. But they offer us an opportunity to view many different projects at once, and they also encourage you to summarize your work in a succinct and visually compelling manner, so we’ll often produce posters no matter what kind of course or topic.
Poster Content
A good ENVS Program student poster often includes these items (please confirm with your instructor):
- Identification information (name[s] of student[s], course, and semester/year)
- A shortened (or easy to remember) link to your project landing page
- Title (and optional abstract or thesis statement; not needed if below is clear)
- Framing question(s), background text, and graphics introducing your topic (top of the hourglass)
- Situated context(s), location map, and actor-process Cmap highlighting specific details related to this context
- Focus question(s) guiding your work in your situated context(s) and methodology for answering it
- Procedure (what you did in implementing your methodology)
- Results you obtained (if completed research), ideally in graphical/tabular format; or timeline for completion
- Comparison/generalization of results, application to your framing question, and policy/research recommendations (bottom of the hourglass)
- List of references cited in text, and for supplemental reading to evidence your mastery of the topic. Don’t include too many, and don’t include any URLs as they can’t be clicked on a poster!
Note that some of the elements above (e.g., “framing/focus question” or “top/bottom of the hourglass”) are terms we use in the ENVS Program to describe our situated research approach; they may not be immediately clear to your audience. So, make sure to use appropriate headings and other poster guidance so that your audience can readily understand your poster. If your poster represents a situated project (as assumed in the above), make sure to look at the situated research rubric for how it would be scored, and a reminder of all items to include.
Note also that a picture is probably worth even more than a thousand words: graphics (with captions as needed) and tables are almost always better ways of conveying information than raw text or numbers. If you need to include a good deal of text, consider abbreviating it (full sentences not necessary), bulleting it, etc.
The archived SGE situated poster gallery has examples of a variety of posters from 2011-2014 illustrating various approaches to layout of these above elements. Alternatively, you may search for more recent ENVS project or capstone outcomes to explore poster possibilities.
Poster Procedure
- Your poster will be a maximum 40 inches wide by 30 inches high, as that’s the size of the foam board it will be affixed to. This size will work for the large-format printer in the IT Resource Lab (in the lower level of Watzek Library), where your poster will get copied. You may design it with any computer application you wish (see e.g. Canva), but many students simply set up one big Powerpoint page for their poster.
- Go to File > Page Setup
- Choose Slides sized for Custom
- Enter width and height accordingly
- Make your poster!
- You may print one final large-format color copy at the expense of the ENVS Program, provided it is for an ENVS course or you have received permission to do so. Here’s how to do this:
- Save your poster in PDF format, which preserves your layout from any application (do verify that the PDF looks correct!).
- Then, follow the instructions here (i.e., email your poster to itservice@lclark.edu); please include e.g. “ENVS Poster” or similar in the email subject.
- You will be notified when your poster is ready to be picked up.
- A big caveat: make sure you give yourself, and the Resource Lab, plenty of time! The lab gets extremely busy at the end of the semester, and if you’re doing a project for a large ENVS course you can bet that lots of other students will be using the lab too.
- Following your poster presentation, share it…
- On your DS site (e.g., as part of a project subsite). The best way to do this: upload a PDF version to your media library, then use Add Media button to embed it on a page or your portfolio.
- On the 2nd floor Howard Hall poster gallery! We would appreciate if you let us keep the copy of your poster so we can display it; if you want your own copy let us know and we can print one separately for the ENVS Program.
Poster Design
- The above doesn’t really get at how important and difficult it is to make a good poster! Remember, you are trying to communicate your work in a clear, convincing, and attention-getting manner, so budget time to do a really nice poster.
- One of the keys to a clear and attractive poster is font size: remember that you want to design your poster to be comfortably read by a viewer at a distance of around three feet. Main poster titles should use a font size somewhere in the 60-100 point range; for the body of your poster, something around 30-50 point font is a good start. (These are just broad guidelines.)
- Resist the urge to throw too many font types into the mix! Also, try not to overlay your text over busy backgrounds.
- There are lots and lots of examples and design hints available online. Here are a couple that can help you get ideas:
- See the archived (2011-14) SGE poster gallery noted above. We are no longer gathering ENVS student posters in one place, but since almost all ENVS senior capstone projects include one, the capstone database is another possibility.
- Colin Purrington has produced an often-cited page on poster design (with e.g. 37 dos and don’ts, 26 presentation ideas, etc.), plus this recent addendum. (The popularity of his page led to a plagiarism war!…see here.)
- There are lots of other design guides online, including these NYU and UT resources, and even a whole blog site devoted to better posters. You will find a few ideas in common on these sites (e.g., less is often more), but feel free to consider your own insights from viewing posters yourself…these are only guidelines.
- Make sure to try your poster design ideas out on your fellow students by printing a small version and sharing it widely…before you print and present your final copy. Or, present a draft version on a classroom screen to get input from fellow students. This may be the most important step of all, so do budget sufficient time for feedback on a draft.