How to Make a Great Poster Board
Poster board is a common material used by students to illustrate presentations, create art projects or display results from an experiment. It is common for students in scholastic competitions to be required to make a poster board display showing their work. Poster board comes in many colors, but it is entirely blank before the student begins to work on it. Therefore, the possibilities for design are endless, but there are certain tips to creating a poster board project that will make it stand out amongst the rest.
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Instructions
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Type all text in large, easy-to-read font. Script fonts will be hard to decipher from a distance, and a poster board is supposed to be able to catch a person's interest from across the room. If you have to get right up against it to read it, the font is too small.
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Summarize text when possible. No one wants to stand around and read lengthy paragraphs of information or poorly organized data. Get your point across using bullet points for facts. Bold important words or concepts.
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Use color to make your poster seem interesting but not distracting. Plain black text on white poster board shows little effort and conveys a sense that the material on the poster board is either unimportant or uninteresting. Instead, use color to grab a reader's attention, but do not overload with color to the point that it becomes a deterrent from reading your work. Main title text can be in a color other than black, but informative text should always be black on a lighter background color.
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Organize your poster board in a logical manner. Consider segmenting your poster board into vertical or horizontal sections so the reader can follow the information without having to hunt for the next logical step. There are some poster boards and foam boards on the market that already come in separate tri-fold formats to help with this organization.
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Stay focused with your message. A poster board should convey one main theme and provide supporting facts to back it up. If you are trying to present many topics, it will be confusing for the reader. Convey this message in your main title.
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Draw a sketch of your design before you start gluing on your poster board or writing on it with permanent markers. You may find that you have less room than originally anticipated. You can also organize decorations, charts, text or other printouts on the board before securing them down.
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Get a second opinion. After you are done with the basic layout or sketch of your poster board, talk to a non-biased individual who can tell you what they see as the strengths and weaknesses of your poster board.
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References
- Photo Credit business team showing results image by Jorge Casais from Fotolia.com
