Poster Printing at Oklahoma State University Library: Tips for poster design

Most posters should have:

• A title
• Your name and affiliation
• Introduction
• Abstract
• Results
• Discussion
• Works Cited
• Acknowledgements

Good posters should have:

Attractive visuals such as

• graphs
• photographs
• maps

General Tips

• Design your poster so that it's readable from a minimum of 5 feet away. Below are a few suggestions for sizing your fonts.
  • Title: 60-80pt
  • Headings: 40-50pt
  • Section text: 30-40pt
• Keep your text as succinct as possible. Your total word count should range between 300 to 800 words
• Use bullets, numbering, and headlines to break up your text and make it easy to read
• Use at most a couple of typefaces (fonts), with an emphasis on readability. If desired, use one for the title and headings, and another for blocks of text.
• Make sure your images are of high enough quality to look good when printed. If you need to make it larger after adding into PowerPoint, chances are it will not look great when printed. You can always test images by printing them out at 100% scale individually.

For more poster design advice

Colin Purrington has a comprehensive site chock full of tips for making an effective poster, as well as templates. 
https://colinpurrington.com/tips/poster-design

You can also download Purrington's tips in poster form.
https://colinpurrington.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/scientific-poster-advice-purrington.pdf

Purrington even provides an example of a bad poster, along with detailed notes about why it's a bad poster.
https://colinpurrington.com/2012/02/example-of-bad-scientific-poster/