Poster research

Poster Research

Making a great poster can be fun and is certainly a challenge!

A GREAT POSTER IS...

readable,

legible,

well organized, and

succinct.

1. WAYS TO MAKE A POSTER ARE

make your own.

Designing the poster panels deserves consideration. Most posters are most quickly made using some kind of computer software. A word processing program plus a few graphics packages (e.g. Microsoft Powerpoint, Macromedia Freehand, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe PageMaker) are important tools. Of these, Powerpoint has the least sophisticated graphics options.

2. CHOOSING BETWEEN TWO POPULAR FORMATS:

a large format poster or

a multiple panel poster.

3. TO BEGIN:

decide what the main message is,

Keep it short and sweet and make this your title! Use the active voice (The Morning After)

measure the space you have,

Regardless of poster format, lay out the space physically as well as on paper to double-check yourself. If you can, make the poster flexible enough to change the size by adding or omitting panels or elements. This flexibility is handy if you are going to more than one meeting, if the poster boards are not exactly the size advertised, if the meetings have different in size requirements for posters, or if you wish to update your data between meetings.

lay out your panels crudely,

Before you actually spend time making the final panels of the poster, take pieces of paper that are about the right size and see if you can actually make it all fit. This will save you a lot of time in the long run.

begin to make individual components of the poster!

4. POSTER LAYOUT HAS TWO ASPECTS:

Consider how to arrange poster elements and text within each panel and

People approach new information in a known spatial sequence: we track vertically from center to top to bottom, and horizontally from left to right. This means that you should put the most important message in the center top position followed by the top left, top right, bottom left, and finish in the bottom right corner. That's why the poster title should be your punch line because, in that position, the title and your name will be seen in the first 11 seconds that a person looks at the poster.

Space is important in a poster: without it, your reader has no visual pauses to think. Books leave space on the margins and by having chapters. Posters that are crammed with information are tiring to read and are seldom read in their entirety. Omit all extraneous text or visual distractions, including borders between related data and text, so the reader can assimilate your ideas easily.

Size of poster elements or the fonts in each panel can serve to emphasize the main points. For example, making your subheadings in all capitals and two font sizes larger than the rest of the text on the same panel will draw the reader's eye first, and so be emphasized. The use of multiple fonts in a poster can distract from the science.

practical matters.

It takes time to make a great poster. Regardless of format, allow 2 to 3 days to assemble all the bits and pieces, such as photos etc, and then 1.5 to 2 days to assemble the poster. That last bit of data you rush around to get at the last moment will go completely unnoticed if your poster is messy and disorganized i.e. illegible and unreadable.

5. FONT CHOICES GIVE YOU OPTIONS WITH

size,

Font sizes need to be big to be effective. A good rule is to stand back from your own poster: if you, who are familiar with the material, cannot easily read it from 6 feet away, your audience will certainly not be able to.

highlighting with text format,

Indents set text apart and are great for short lists.

Justification of text in the center of a line will draw attention.

basic font choice and highlighting with font variations.

Choose a basic font whose "e's" and "a's" stay open at all sizes and that is supported by your printer.Bookman, Helvetica, and Geneva are examples of good choices. The choice of serif or sans serif is largely a personal matter. If your font is not supported by the printer, you will get ragged edges on all your letters.

Highlighting a few parts of the text is done easily with:

/ capitals as in the "go CHILDREN slow" or the "Stop,..." street signs,
/ Zapf dingbats instead of numbers for simple lists of things,
/ wrapped letters that arc around an image,
/ switch styles (bold, italics, shadow, etc.).

6. COLOR

Ways to add color,

A color border or background is a fast way to add color to a poster. Choosing colors that do not compete with your data, that look good once printed, and that color blind people can see is wise.

If you opted for a multiple panel poster, then LaserFoil allows you to make your printed words from a laser printer come out in color. Available in mat, glossy, and "prism" finishes, LaserFoil can add pizzaz to a poster. Colored graphic tape or dots, and white arrows (Chartpak, Lettraset) can be quickly applied to poster elements to draw attention to the elements you wish to.

contrast,

Proper contrast will reduce eye strain and make the poster more legible and interesting visually. Again, be careful that the color does not outclass the visual impact of your data: too much contrast is hard on the eyes and can distract the reader from your data.

Adding light color backgrounds to your figures can make the poster attractive. For example, using white lettering and lines on a blue background can make your poster eyecatching. Like a painting, poster elements can also be double matted physically or digitally to add interesting contrast.

7. CHECK TWO THINGS BEFORE YOU “ASSEMBLE” THE POSTER

have others review it for you,

do take a moment for ethical considerations.

8. FINISHING YOUR POSTER

It is trivial to assemble a poster once you have decided on and made all the individual elements. Be sure to give yourself enough time to finish the poster,say 1-3 days, so you have time to reprint it if necessary to revise color or content, or to simply get into the printing queue!
Posted by whats going on at 04:01 0 comments
Evaluation so far
So far we have uploaded our footage onto the computer and made clips over every scene. We have chosen the correct footage and edited it together. So far we are very pleased with the result although we have come across one problem. In the scene where Amy and Jack are having a conversation the following morning over a cup of coffee we had a 'jump cut' and because we didn't film enough different shots, we have faced a fairly big problem. It looks messy and disjointed and therefore we have decided we need to re film that scene again making sure we get a bigger variation of shots and shot sizes.
At the same time as doing this we will also take the photographs for our film poster because although we have drawn out a plan and some rough ideas we need to start putting it together into a poster.

Whilst we are waiting to re-shoot our short film we are doing the titles and music. Although choosing the 'font' for film titles seems like a minor thing we are having to put a lot of thought into it to find something that suits the genre and character of our film as well as choosing where is appropriate to have music and what type of music is it that we want?


Ideas for our poster:
Because our film is a 'Rom com' we want the poster too have an element of comedy in it to draw in peoples attention and interest. Because our short film has a fairly basic simple storyline to it we thought the best thing to have an image of was. The awkward moment when they wake up the morning after...
possible ideas;
-possibly with thinking bubbles filled with images from the night before.
-speech bubbles. showing what there thinking
-title of the film
-cast
-age certificate
-quotes?