Designing Effective Posters: Home

Welcome! The purpose of Designing Effective Posters is to help you communicate through a poster. This research guide includes the following sections:

Starting the Poster Design Process: Describes the tasks for creating a poster. Refer to this section for help with planning and carrying out your poster project.

Getting Started With PowerPoint and Adobe InDesign: This is where you'll find introductory information on setting up your poster. PowerPoint and InDesign are two of the most common software programs used for poster creation. 

Design Elements: Several design elements make up a successful poster. 

• Layout and Text: Learn more about details like alignment, spacing, and fonts in this section. 
• Images and Graphics: Images and graphics are essential to posters. Here are some notes on finding and using images.
• Adding and Revising Content with PowerPoint: If you don't have experience with InDesign, we recommend using PowerPoint to create your poster. It's very user-friendly and is compatible with both Windows and Mac. 
• Adding and Revising Content with InDesign: If you want to incorporate advanced design features into your poster, try Adobe InDesign. It has a much steeper learning curve but it very versatile. It is compatible with both Windows and Mac. 
• UNC Logos: Students, faculty, and researchers associated with UNC are encouraged to include a relevant logo design on their poster. This page contains downloadable logos for the health sciences schools and for UNC.
• Evaluation Checklist: We created a sheet that you can save and download when you want to evaluate a poster. This is where you'll find it!

Before & After Examples: See some real examples of posters for inspiration. 

Poster Templates: Not sure where to start? We've created a handful of free PowerPoint templates that you can download and edit.

Good luck!