Blue Waters Symposium

Poster Guidelines

Making a Poster

  • A piece of 30” x 40” foam core will be provided as well as push pins, tape, spray glue, etc. to allow you to attach your materials.
  • The focus should be on the research content rather than the look of the poster.
  • There will not be any judging of the posters.
  • One large poster or multiple smaller sheets of paper may be used to present the content of your research. We do not want you to spend money preparing a poster.

Poster Content

  • Title: project title
  • Authors: your name, institution, names of collaborators, and faculty advisors (if appropriate)
  • Research Goal
  • Methods
  • Computational tools
  • Results and Findings
  • References and/or publications related to this work
  • Summary/conclusions
  • Future plans
  • Acknowledgments: include any sources of funding/support you received and the Blue Waters specific acknowledgment:

This research is part of the Blue Waters sustained-petascale computing project, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (awards OCI-0725070 and ACI-1238993) and the state of Illinois. Blue Waters is a joint effort of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Tips for Designing a Poster

  • Keep it Simple!
  • Arrange your material in a logical progression
  • Arrange materials in columns
  • Don’t try to include too much information on the poster
  • Selecting Colors and Fonts
    • Use only 2 or 3 colors in the poster: too many colors can be distracting
    • Select font colors and background colors to maximize contrast:  A dark font on a light background is more easily read than vice versa
    • Choose a font size and style that can be read easily from several feet away
  • To emphasize a point, use bold or italics rather than underlining as underlined words can be more difficult to read