Pennsylvania's Swarthmore College has a great resource on poster design:
http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/cpurrin1/posteradvice.htm

A few of the key principles:
- Be very judicious with text. Avoid the temptation to overstuff your poster with words
- For most fonts, 36pt is the smallest you'll want to go for the body of your poster. A smaller font is acceptable for references and cutlines.
- Aspect ratio: make sure to preserve the width-to-height ratio of photos and logos to avoid squishing or stretching them.
- Contrast: Light text on a dark background (or vice versa) is important for legibilty. If the text is too similar in shade and colour to the background, it will be difficult to read.
- White space: Leaving space in your poster

Our faculty Flickr page is a great resource for finding photos to use: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lfslearningcentre/
- Make sure to download “original”-sized photos for maximum quality.

Photos that have been given Creative Commons licenses by photographers are often available to be used as well.
- Here’s information on Creative Commons: http://www.creativecommons.ca/
- And here’s a great photo searching site, powered by Flickr and Creative Commons: http://www.compfight.com/

Poster printing

FYI, here are some tips for printing posters at the Learning Centre:
- Posters should be saved as PowerPoint slides or PDFs with one edge 42 inches (106.6 cm) or less
- Each print is $25. There may be surcharges for extra large posters or those that use a lot of ink.
- Payment may be made in cash or charged to a speedchart
- Learning Centre poster printing is only available to students, staff and faculty in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems
- Try to make appointments for poster printing at least a week in advance
- Poster consultations are available and consist of a review of the poster for clarity, formatting, legibility and, if desired, aesthetic considerations

The Learning Centre is not able to laminate posters wider than 24". We recommend consulting UBC’s Media Group on campus (they charge $2/sq ft). Kinko’s also provides printing and laminating. The Kinko’s at Broadway and Cypress offers a 30 per cent discount to UBC-affiliated customers. Their usual rate is $9/sq ft for printing and $3/sq ft for laminating. CopieSmart in the UBC village charges $6/sqft.

Contact Duncan in the Learning Centre if you have any questions about poster printing.