Poster Store

Tips

• Adjust for your audience. Don't push sequence alignment algorithms to astrophysics people, and do show off cool enactor stuff to computer science geeks.
• Include ScreenShots of Taverna in general or your particular feature in close up. Make a new screenshot, don't include something from Taverna 0.2. If you want it to look good, you can try doing this on a Mac. (Use Grab from Applications->Utillities)
• Feature a new (preferably working) workflow, and explain what it scientifically is doing (with due credits to the author, of course). Try using "Save as Postscript" from Taverna, then convert using Adobe Illustrator or similar. Although there can be a few conversion issues, this should give you a vector version of the workflow diagram which scales up and can look nice even on a A0 poster. Turn off boring details, ports, etc, unless they are relevant.
• Scale ScreenShots so that they will be readable on the poster. As a minimum, the screenshots should be as big (in centimeters) as they would have been on a decent monitor, but not much larger.
• Use vector graphics whenever possible. This is specially important for big posters and logos, as pixelation effects (blocks) will appear when using low-resolution bitmaps, making the whole thing look horrible. Even if it looks OK on your low-resolution screen (~90 dpi), it doesn't mean it will look good on a print out (~ 600 dpi).
• Include the (vector-version) logos of all your relevant sponsors. Here's the Omii logo, the University of Manchester logo, the University of Southampton logo and the myGrid logo. Note that for instance the ManchesterLogo has a 'rule' that it should be in the upper left hand corner.
• Include an updated list of Acknowledgements. Double-check the list. Make sure your name is there.
• Use proper software like OmniGraffle (on the Mac), Adobe Illustrator, or as a last attempt, PowerPoint^?.
• Remember that you are making a poster, not a presentation, so pay (even more than usual) attention to font types (should be uniform), font sizes, picture quality, colours, whitespace and readability.
• It's better to drop a paragraph and have the lines and characters generously spaced, than cramming everything you want to say together into an unreadable block.
• Use real paragraphs, never line breaks. This means there should be vertical space (almost like a blank line, but it can be smaller) between paragraphs. This can usually be adjusted as the 'Paragraph formatting', but if your software is hard to use, just insert a blank line.
• Configure your page size to match the intended poster size, most importantly to get the aspect ratio right. (A2 has a ratio of 1.414, a normal 1600x1200 screen has 1.333)
• Don't overcrowd the poster. If people are really interested they will check out our web site or our papers - or simply talk to us as we are standing by the poster. You are standing next to your poster, right?

Poster templates

The following are all Microsoft PowerPoint format templates (.pot)

• myGrid-A1-P.pot: General myGrid poster, size A1, portrait layout

This watermarked background was at the Apple developer conference:

• posterbackground.pdf: watermarked poster background with logos (PDF)

• posterbackground.graffle.zip: watermarked poster background with logos (OmniGraffle^?)

Posters for specific meetings

(Note: some of these posters have been edited subsequently to remove personal images no longer cleared for public use.)

• AllHands2005Posters
• AllHands2004Posters
• AllHands2003Posters

• BBSRCGrantHolders2004Posters

• EPSRCeScience2004Posters
• EPSRCeScience2005Posters^?

• WWDC2006Posters -- the Apple developer conference

• Pauls_poster.pdf: 2006 Student Research Symposium - Paul Fisher's poster on "A systematic strategy for large-scale unbiased analysis of Genotype-Phenotype correlations"

• EPSRCeScience2007Posters Edinburgh ESPRC eScience All Hands meeting