The other day I was asked a Powerpoint question (how to do an interactive slide show that had branches and so on) and that reminded me that I hadn’t ever written down a note on another non-standard use of Powerpoint—making a poster. I correct that oversight now (so I have a place to refer someone the next time the question arises).
About six months ago I needed to make a poster for a SPARC (think journals, not processors) conference and I drew a complete blank. I thought about doing a few screens with Powerpoint or Keynote and then printing them off and pasting them to a panel…but then it hit me. Do the poster as a single screen in Powerpoint…but define the “page size” as something really big.
I checked with Kinko’s and found that 30″ x 40″ was a typical size…so I set my page size to 30×40 and began designing my poster. Using Text Boxes it was pretty easy to do the poster’s layout and having it inside Powerpoint as a ‘single slide’ made editing really easy. You need to remember to bump the font sizes up…since readers will be a bit further away from the final product. I found 24point worked well for most of the text with 32point for paragraph headings and 60 point for the poster’s banner heading.
When finished, I took the file to Kinkos, they printed the poster and attached it to a sheet of foam board. I think the final product came in at around $100 or so (the foam board and color kicking it up in price).