Poster design guide

Layout

The finished size is 47.48″ wide × 35.61″ tall, landscape. That fits the 36″ roll without scaling.

• Make the title and the key result readable from ten feet.
• Use columns — usually three — reading left to right, top to bottom.
• Leave white space. Generous margins and gaps between sections do more for readability than squeezing in another paragraph.

Type sizes for print

Print is not a computer screen. What looks generous on your device tends to shrink at poster scale, so start from these and adjust upward.

Helvetica Neue is CU's brand font. If you do not have a license for it, Helvetica, Arial, and Arial Nova are the recommended substitutes and are available in most applications — the PowerPoint and MARP templates use Arial. The LaTeX template uses Raleway and Lato, which are also fine. Pick one or two families and stop there.

Figures that stay sharp

Export vectors wherever you can

Plots, charts, diagrams, and schematics should be PDF or SVG. Vector graphics have no resolution to run out of, so they print sharp at any size. This one habit prevents almost every blurry-figure problem.

Keep raster formats for things that genuinely are rasters: photographs, microscopy, rendered visualisations. Avoid JPEG for anything with sharp edges or text, since its compression smears them.

If it has to be a raster, count the pixels

Target 300 DPI at the size it will be printed. Above 300 DPI you gain nothing visible and only grow the file size.

What matters is the pixel count against the printed size, not the DPI tag stored in the file:

pixels needed = printed width in inches × DPI

Set the resolution when you export, rather than fixing it afterwards:

• plt.savefig('figure.png', dpi=300)
• ggsave('figure.png', dpi=300)
• exportgraphics(gcf, 'figure.png', 'Resolution', 300)

Labels and captions

• Axis labels, ticks, and legends need to be readable at arm's length — think 18–24 pt equivalent, minimum.
• Caption every figure, briefly, underneath. Number them so you can refer to them.

CU colors

The templates already use these. If you are building from scratch, you can use these colors to stay with the CU theme.

What goes on a poster

A physics poster usually runs in this order. Not every poster needs every part.

1. Title banner — title, authors, affiliations, department and funding logos
2. Introduction or motivation — what problem, and why it matters
3. Methods or experimental setup — how you went about it
4. Results — the findings, with figures, plots, or tables
5. Discussion or conclusions — what it means and what comes next
6. References — five to ten, not a bibliography
7. Acknowledgments — funding, collaborators, advisors

Equations

• Include only the equations someone needs to follow the work.
• Number and label any equation you refer to.
• Define every variable where it first appears.
• Set displayed equations large enough to read from three or four feet.

Plots and data

• Large axis and tick labels, and units on every axis.
• Use colorblind-friendly maps such as viridis or cividis, and avoid red-and-green-only encodings. You can check your figures with a colorblind simulator (like COBLIS).
• Put legends on the plot rather than leaving them to the caption.
• Make error bars clearly visible.

Tables

• Keep them small. Past roughly fifteen entries, a plot usually reads better.
• Use clean horizontal rules or alternating shading instead of heavy gridlines.
• Bold the header row and put units in the column headers.

Common mistakes

• Too much text. A poster is not a paper. Around 800 words total, excluding references, is a good ceiling.
• Low-resolution images. Screen-resolution figures pixelate badly at poster size. Check pixels against printed size, or export vector images.
• Poor contrast. View your poster at 50% zoom: if you cannot read it, nobody at the session will either.
• Tiny references. 18–20 pt minimum, same as everything else.
• No visual focus. One figure or result should catch the eye immediately.
• No CU affiliation. Include a CU logo in the title banner — the university lockup or the Physics one, not both. The template bundles ship both in their assets/ folder.