Guidelines for Design Conference Poster
CS486: Senior Capstone Design

Overview

Although some people at the Capstone Conference will make it to your formal talk, many will not -- there are many tracks running in parallel competing for their attention. Even for those who make it to your talk, the talk itself may go by too fast for them to catch all of the details. Finally, there is never enough time in your talk to thoroughly demo the software that you've produced.

The purpose of a poster session is to address these problems by providing a time when spectators can visit your "booth", review the project by reading over your poster, ask you questions, and see you demo the project for them. The poster is the central part of this process: it should allow a reader to quickly appreciate the gist of the project, including some or all of the following:

• Project motivations and purpose: what is missing in today's world, and why does your project fit the bill?
• what does your overall solution look like? Approach? Architecture? Screenshots?
• What are the key cool features of your solution?
• Problems or obstacles you encountered.
• Highlights of the outcome, e.g., time or dollars it saves, etc.
• Whatever else might help viewers grasp the brilliance of your project.

The important thing is that the poster should be eye-catching --- lots of pictures and color, arranged in a coherent way to best show off your work. Resist the temptation to cover the whole thing with densely written text! More like a huge powerpoint slide: some pics, some keys points, some diagrams --- nice.

How to:

I recommend just using Powerpoint. Start a new presentation that contains just one slide. Set the canvas size for the slide to huge --- poster format. So that's about 3x4ft, or whatever your poster backing board measured. When you're ready for the final draft, use the poster printer in the Construction Management lab to print the final, large version. Glue it to your poster board and, ta-da, you're ready to wow the crowds...

REWARD? What Reward?

Though it's not widely advertised yet, the last several years the college has been giving out a number of " Best Poster" awards to the top-scoring handful of posters, as evaluated by a panel of faculty from around the college. This is usually MONEY --- so a little flair on the poster could really pay off!