About one month ago, I submitted an abstract to the Poster Conference, and it was accepted. Then I attended the workshop provided by the graduate school, which only provided limited information about how to make an academic poster. Thus, I searched around on the Internet, and got some ideas from some other presenters.
Definitely, I would never use M$ PowerPoint to make a poster, but I tried Numbers a bit, which brought me a very suffering experience. The main disadvantage of PowerPoint-like tools is that you can't set the position precisely; however, this is extremely important to graphic design.
Then I considered to use HTML or CSS to make a poster, so I searched around again, but there was limited resources about how to use them as a beginner. The learning curve of these two languages is quite deep, so I gave up again.
Next, I tried to switch to some photo editing softwares. Absolutely, I can't afford Photoshop family, so GIMP or Inkscape would be my choice. Nevertheless, both of them need X11 to run on OS X, which makes them terribly slow.
Any other choice?
YES, that's Scribus, an open-source desktop publishing tool. I played it fro days, and successfully made a poster for the conference. This tool matches all my requirements: free, easy to learn, easy to use, fast and precise.
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| I borrowed this Fail Whale picture from Twitter 404 page, which was designed by Yiying Lu. This design is really talented, and the color blending is unique. I downloaded a PNG-format picture from Google Image Search, and resized it. Then I changed the whole background color to match the Fail Whale image. Then I added the title and logo of my uni to the poster, also, I made a QR code there. |
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| I tried to put the body of text and a plot to the poster. The plot was made by Google Spreadsheet, however, I can't change its background color, so I used Numbers to remake it. This design was really awful, and my friends suggested me to put some text frames instead. |
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| This is the first draft of the text frames. As you can see, the orange text frames make a big I there. i aligned the sub-headings to the right, which is balanced, I think. With Scribus, you can easily change the position of the text frame precisely by changing the position values in Property, but you can never do this in any PowerPoint-like software. |
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| I sent the first draft so several friends, and they didn't like the design as the bottom text frame cuts the poster. Hence, I redesigned the text frames, which looks much balanced, isn't it? |
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| One of my friends told me that he doesn't like the position of the text, because it fully fills the frame. Actually, I noticed that as well, but I couldn't find where to set the value. Then I referred to the wiki page of Scribus, which provides a very detailed instruction, and I learnt how to set that value. It is very worth reading. |
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| Another friend told me he can't find the title of my poster easily, and asked me to change its font size. Due to the limited room, I set the size as 60pt at first, and then changed to 80pt. |
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| I revised the texts on my poster, trying to keep them concise. |
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| The poster drafts above look empty, so I decided to add some plots. I used Numbers to generate all plots, and used Siktch to make screenshots for them. I used ColorScheme Studio to find a suitable color blending, and I thought this would be a proper one. |
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| I finished all plots, but these look awful, right? The wrong position, the wrong color blending. |
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| I aligned all text frames and plots to the same line, looks a bit better. |
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| One friend tole me that the color of the text frames looks too bright, so I reduced their opacity individually. |
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| But the color of those plots were really terrible, so I remade all plots, and changed the background color to the main background color. I used Numbers to control the precise RGB value to of the color, but there is an incredible bug in that app. Even if you set the RGB value to a specific value, the output color is totally different from your setting! I spent one morning to adjust the right value to what I want. I complained this bug on Apple support forum, and it seemed that other people also suffered, but Apple has not taken any solution yet. |
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| Another friend insisted me to change the position of the sub-headings. I spent a whole night to change the position, and the line spacing of the body. Also, I added a watermark to thank Yiying Lu. Can you find it? |
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| I removed all opacity changes of the text frames. |
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| I aligned all text frames and plot to the same line, and moved the text frames to left a bit. |
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I asked some friends to check my text, and they provided many helpful suggestions. This is the final version of my poster.
Thank all friends who offered helps to me. Without them, I can't finish this challenge.
Some notes about this poster:
- size: A1
- font: Ubuntu/Ubuntu mono
- title size: 80pt
- sub-heading size: 30pt
- body size: 24pt
- captain size:14pt
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