Speaker 1: Okay, so first of all, I'm going to be showing you how to make an academic poster in PowerPoint. Step one is to choose the size of your poster. So check the website of the conference where you're going to be presenting the poster and find out what poster size they want you to have and also whether you need to have it landscape or portrait. So in my case, I need to have it size a zero and for it to be portrait. Then open up a blank PowerPoint presentation, delete everything on the slide, go to design, slide size, custom slide size. Then here is a diagram to help you choose what width and height you need. In my case, I need it to be 84.1 centimeters wide and 118.9 centimeters high. Then select okay. It will ask you whether you want to maximize or ensure fit. As the slide is blank, it doesn't make any difference. Once you have chosen the size of your poster, step two is to choose the content and the layout. When making a poster for an academic conference, you have to submit the poster title in advanced and you also have to write a poster abstract. You can use these as your starting off point by copying and pasting them into the PowerPoint presentation and then increasing their font size and rearranging them on the poster. After you have these, you need to add to the abstract and edit it to put it into a poster format. Posters need lots of sub-sections, everything needs to be written in short sentences and everything also needs to be in bullet points. As you are adding the content to your poster, you also need to decide what the layout is going to be. For portrait posters, they are usually split into two sections. For landscape posters, you have more options, but they are usually in three or four sections. Also, as you are deciding the layout, make sure the order of the sections goes from top to bottom and from left to right. Once you have decided on the content and the layout of your poster, step three is to add in all of the extra content. The first piece of extra content that you need are logos, the university logo, the conference logo, and the logos of any organisations funding your research. You can usually get these off of the internet. When choosing the file formats for your logos, it's best to choose a vector image. Some examples of vector file formats are any files ending in .eps, .svg or .pdf. If you can't find a vector image, use a raster image and choose as high a resolution as possible. Some examples of raster file formats are any files ending in .jpg, .png, .bitmap or .tiff. Once you have downloaded your logos, you can import them as pictures, put them at the bottom of your poster, make them all the same size and line them up. The next piece of additional content that you need is a photo of yourself. You're going to want a head and shoulders photo, similar to the sort of thing you would have on a LinkedIn profile. Put this at the bottom of your poster and put your name and your university email address right next to it. The next piece of additional content that you need is a list of co-authors. When you submitted a poster abstract for the conference, you should have included a list of co-authors, so you can just copy and paste this. The list of co-authors should go at the top of the poster, just underneath the title. This is a list of anybody who made major contributions to the research of the poster. After every author's name, there should be a superscript number, then below the list, the same superscript number and the organization that that person is from. The next piece of additional content that you need is an acknowledgements section. This should go at the bottom of the poster and should start, this poster was possible because of the work of... or this work was funded by... or words to that effect. And should include anybody who made minor contributions to the research in the poster or any organizations that funded the research. The final additional piece of content that you need is a references section. In-text references should be superscript numbers because they take up the least amount of space. Then the references list should go at the bottom of the poster and you should make your references as short as possible. So the first author's name, et al., the year it was published, the abbreviated name of the journal it was published in and then its DOI number, its unique digital object identifier. Once you have added in all your extra content, step four is to add in images. The same rules apply as for logos. Use vector or high-resolution raster images. There are lots of places where you can get images from. If you are presenting your own research, you'll have made your own charts and graphs. You can also take images out of journal articles and there are lots of free online resources available. I recommend creating your own resource of images which you can draw on for future posters. If you are using an image which doesn't belong to you, make sure you say where it came from. A small URL right next to the image is usually sufficient. If you are worried about the quality of your images, zoom into them to 100%. That will be the size it is when it's printed so you can see if it is blurry or pixelated. Once you have chosen your images, step five is to choose the font. It's best to stick to just two or three fonts and there are two main types of fonts. There are serif fonts which are the fonts that have little feet at the end of the letters. Then there are non-serif fonts or sans-serif fonts which are the fonts that don't have feet at the end of their letters. It's best to choose a non-serif font for titles and subheadings. Here's some examples of some popular non-serif fonts. And then use a serif font for the main body of the text because those sorts of fonts are easier to read at smaller font sizes. Just whatever you do, don't use Comic Sans. When it comes to font sizes, here is a helpful diagram to guide you. It's just important to remember that the font sizes and font types in the graphs and charts should also match the rest of the poster. Some other pieces of advice for making your text more readable is to have the title in a sentence case so only the first letter of the first word is a capital letter because we are more used to reading sentence case. Also make the line spacing 1.5 so there are nice big gaps in between each of the lines. Some people also like to justify their text so making it both right and left aligned. This does look nicer but because it makes the spaces in between each word variable it makes it harder for people to read. Also make the titles and the headings bold but leave the rest of the text as normal. Once you have chosen the fonts for your poster, step 6 is to choose the colours. It's best to stick to a light background with a darker text because that is what people are most used to reading. You can however do the reverse for the titles and the subheadings and have a darker background and a white text. PowerPoint has inbuilt colour schemes. If you go to design and then variants and colours there are a range of colour schemes to choose from. Then if you select an object and go back to formats the fill colours now have different colour options. It's best to stick to colours that are all from the same theme. And remember if you have graphs or diagrams those also need to have colours that match the rest of the poster. If you want to add in extra colour a couple of good ways of doing that are to add colour to the bullet points and also to increase the size of the bullet points or you can also add in a coloured border and make that border thicker. After you have chosen the colours of your poster, step 7 is to line everything up. First of all you're going to need to make sure everything is the right size so I'm going to extend the summary text box until it is 38.5 centimetres wide. Then I am going to select all of the other text boxes below it and make sure their size is also 38.5 centimetres so they're all exactly the same length. I can then hold down control and select the summary box again then go to align and align centre so now they are all perfectly lined up. Useful features for lining up everything on the poster are the grid lines which will put little dots all over the poster which you can then use to make sure the text boxes are all lined up correctly. You can also change the size of the grid lines by opening up the show box and changing the spacing. Then there is also the guides which are completely straight lines which can be moved around the poster and these can also be used to make sure everything is lining up correctly. If I zoom out you can see that there is also a horizontal version of this and the grid lines and the guides won't appear on the poster when it's printed. Once you have lined everything up correctly the final step, step 8, is to convert it to a PDF. If your PowerPoint presentation is opened in a slightly different version of PowerPoint this can change the way it looks, converting it to a PDF will avoid this problem. To convert it go to file and print and select Microsoft print to PDF, then print, then save the poster and now you have the poster as a PDF. And that is everything.