Speaker 1: Hey everyone and welcome back to my channel. Today I'm going to be sharing with you how I make posters for conferences with Canva. So I think when you start a PhD one thing you realise is that there's a lot of stuff that you didn't really realise happened in academia, one of which is representing your work in poster format. So that's something I definitely wasn't aware of before and typically there's you know some different templates you can use but they're not really amazing and nowadays with a lot of the conferences being online we're actually being asked to do posters in landscape format rather than portrait so there's definitely not a ton of great templates out there for that. So I decided that I would make my own templates and just design than myself using Canva. Canva is a great way to make any kind of graphics. I've been using it for a good while now for Instagram posts and things like that. I use the pro version and that's because it has some extra things that you just can't get with the free version, however there is a ton that you can do with the free version so I highly recommend it and I will have an affiliate link down below for Canva which basically means if you choose to sign up for the free trial or the pro monthly or annual subscription then I get a little something in return. So I really hope this video is useful for you and if you are designing a poster in Canva make sure to tag me on Instagram because I would love to see what you end up making. So here we are on canva.com, you can see that there are a ton of different things you can use this for. So I personally use this for a lot of my own Instagram posts as well as Instagram posts for my startup company Daisier. So you can see down here I have all of my designs so scrolling through here you can see some Instagram posts that I would have used for our startup as well as Instagram stories and all of my YouTube thumbnails as well I make in Canva and you can also see that I've recently made a poster here as well as using it for making videos and things like that as well. So basically Canva is just a super versatile way to make different graphics and I think as a researcher it can be a very good way to represent your research in a way that people will understand. So for today we're going to go through how to make a poster for your research. So just so that you can see here we've got tons of different options for different things that you can do. So if I type in poster it will come up with like given sizes and then you can resize it to be whatever size you want. So I'm gonna go with this size just because that's one that I used before. But again if you want to resize it all you have to do is click up here and resize it to whatever dimensions you want. So you can see there's lots of templates here for posters. Now for academic posters I think these templates aren't necessarily going to be the most helpful. The reason I'm doing this poster landscape is because at the moment a lot of the conferences that we'll be participating in will be online which essentially means that the posters will be viewed on screens and so they'll mostly be looked at landscape but typically you would be designing posters that are portrait and the reason I designed this in Canva was because there aren't a lot of good kind of templates available for landscape posters. I'm just gonna call this something just so that it says something and so the first thing that we want to do is add on some graphs so in the upload section here you can upload a ton of different things from your computer so I already have a lot of things uploaded into Canva so I've got like a ton of graphs and things like that here so just so that you get an understanding of how your spacing is gonna work if you've got a couple different graphs that you already want to include you can just add those in and then sort of resize so trying to remember that this poster is meant to be like a zero size so very very large and it just means that you know you have to think about how it's going to look when it's completely zoomed in like this and what kind of sizing would be appropriate so I'm just going to go ahead and add these in to start just to get some sort of bearing on the sizing of everything to begin with and I can readjust the sizes in a sec but basically just adding in some sort of main things from my paper that I'm representing here but you can see it's pretty easy to like resize different things and at the moment I'm just sort of seeing how everything fits together like whether they look okay together and checking every once in a while if they're still gonna be visible when I zoom in properly. What I like about Canva as well, they have these like grid things that kind of show you when things are the right height and things like that and that's just really helpful for making sure everything's kind of cohesive. So let's just move these down a little bit so now I can kind of get an understanding of the general poster layout and to make sure that everything is visible when I zoom into the kind of correct size that it will be. I might just move these over a bit as well so trying to make use of the full space on the poster because like all of that space can be quite dead and just leaving a little bit of room at the bottom because I'm going to want to add a a little label for each of the graphs. So I'm moving these here. Okay so now I'm gonna go back and add in a title. So it's good to add in like whatever affiliations you might have, so adding them into like the title as well as in an acknowledgement section. It's just always nice to have those and probably you have to have them for your research institutes, whatever they might be. So I'm just adding these in up in the corners so that they're visible and then I'm going to go and add in a title so let's see so I'm just adding in the title of the actual paper and then I'm just gonna resize it so that it's an appropriate size and then I'm gonna add it up the top Okay and now I'm going to just make sure that all looks okay. Zoom in. Yeah, it's not too big but it could be maybe a little bit smaller. Okay, and then I'm going to add in the authors. For now I'm just going to put in random author names just because I don't want to mention other authors in my university just because I feel like that's not appropriate. Obviously I can share stuff for myself but it doesn't really make sense to do it for other people blah blah blah when it's on the internet. So just going to add in some authors and then To make use of the extra sides, I can add in something over this side for contact. So, firstname.lastnameinstitute.ie, so like adding in whatever way is good for people to get in touch with you. Okay, and then adding in some of these little captions for these images. So adding in little captions, and making sure, again, that everything is just like fitting in well, and then adding in And making sure again that everything is just like fitting in well. And just to mention, you can change the font and everything. I like to keep pretty simple and a font that's easy to read. But there's tons of different options. I think for anything research-based, if you're presenting this in a conference, it's good to keep it simple. But if you're doing it more for social media and things like that, you might want to use one of the more fun fonts. So just adding in these captions to just help a little bit with understanding the purpose of the images. Okay, so now that that's done, I want to now section off the different parts of this poster. So what I'm going to do is go into Elements and just find something. So here I've just got a very simple line. So that's something that's going to be handy just for like sectioning things off. Let's see. So I like to use a pretty simple kind of color scheme for these things. So I'm just going to make this kind of a light gray. And you can see something that's really handy about Canva is it uses your photos to turn different color palettes. So if I want to use the same colors that's in this part of the image, I can use those really easily. So I'm just going for a nice kind of light gray color to add little sections for the paper for the poster. that's just going to make it kind of smoothly transition for different sections and then I can add in the text so I'm going to use the same sort of size as this but I want to add in some headings as well so this is going to be the heading size and I'm going to keep this pretty simple I'm going to have an introduction section, and then a methodology section, and a results section. So I might move these down again. So you can see there's lots of kind of fiddly kind of playing around to make sure everything kind of fits together which that's one thing about making your own templates can be a bit annoying but they do end up turning out really nicely so I still would recommend it. And just a little acknowledgement section as well. So now we can go ahead and add in like all of the text and rather than filling out all of this I'm just gonna fill in like some random paragraphs just to show you how it would look filled out. So as well you can add in things like bullet points, why this is important, and then like just to kind of fill this out basically I'm going to just copy and paste this a few times. Okay, so that is our poster all filled out. kind of up to you how text-based you want it to be. This is, I'd say, quite text-based, so you could remove some of the text and just make it more bullet points, make the font a bit bigger, but I definitely have seen ones that are more text-based, so I think this is somewhere in the middle, but as I said, it's just about what suits your work and what makes it the most easy way to understand it. I'm just also adding in like conference information up here so for whatever conference you know and the date and stuff and the location up the top on this side just that you also have that because if it's being presented in a conference then you'll want to have that information and they'd probably like it to be there as well. So that's just the last thing to add in and yeah that is it for this little tutorial. I will definitely be doing a few more Canva tutorials in the future in particular for making a teaser trailer video for your paper because that's something as well I think it's starting to become more prevalent as more and more conferences are going to be online so I wanted to show you how I made one recently using Canva and I really hope this video is helpful if you are creating any posters in Canva be sure to tag me on Instagram I'll have my handle linked down below it's kiraxfeely and be sure to subscribe to see more PhD and productivity related content. Thank you so much to all of my members we are a little growing community now so thanks so much to everyone who has been joining and if you would like to join our productive community be sure to use the link down below. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video.