Creating a Quality Poster

• To allow attendees to see what everyone has done, since the talks are concurrent, attendees can't go to all the subsequent talks
• To drive attendees to YOUR talk. if your poster is so enticing, then more people will want to see more about what you did, and thus go to your talk
• To be seen for the BEST POSTER AWARD. All posters are evaluated by faculty and rated. An award goes to the best poster each quarter

• Be sure your name is on your poster and you have a clear title.
• Do not just print out your Powerpoint slides and paste them on a poster board.
• Your poster should have a clear purpose, a purpose that a reader can immediately grasp.
• Make sure someone knows what you've done without verbal explanation, that the poster information is effectively conveyed and specific points are well explained.
• The poster must be big enough to both be readable and accommodate an adequate amount of material. Size of 36 by 48 inches is standard.
• Organize the flow and graphics so that they are visible to someone standing a few feet away from you. (Make sure the font pointsize is big enough.)
• It's hard to see white paper on a white board but a simple solution is to put colored paper behind the white (with some showing) to offset the white.
• Different ways to organize the content include temporal, topical, problem/solution, or cause/effect.
• Remember that we read left to right and top to bottom. The flow becomes more natural, clearer when you've incorporated this orientation.

You can find sample posters (from previous colloquiums) posted in the hallway on the third floor of UW1. Here are additional sample posters, all of whom won (or co-won) the best poster award at the Colloquium they were presented:

• "UI Design Research for iCare Mental Health Chatbot" (Pranshu Bhardwaj, Winter 2024)
• "Learn Databases: A Database Query Learning Tool" (Reiner Opitz, Spring 2023)
• "WellnessIQ: Health Monitoring Application" (Sarah Asad, Winter 2023)
• "Software Engineering Studio: Using Azure Devops to Teach the CI/CD Pipeline in a Class Environment" (Mark Mavis, Autumn 2022)
• "ECG-Cataloguer: Creating and Analyzing Machine-Learning Datasets" (Gary Guiragossian, Summer 2022)
• "Digital Plumbing @ Second Spectrum" (Scarlett G. Halima, Summer 2022)
• "QuickCheck: Help Kids' Vision Problem" (Wooyoung Son, Spring 2022)
• "Designing Immersive Flashcards" (Jay Quedado, Winter 2022)
• "AccessMap: An Accessible Pedestrian App" (Jay Lin, Autumn 2021)
• "Mitigating Poisoning Attacks Against Federated Learning Defense Algorithms" (Benjamin Birchman, Summer 2021)
• "Project Inkbrush: 2D Platformer Game in the Art Style of Traditional East Asian Paintings" (Sean Miles, Spring 2021): For more information on Project Inkbrush, see here.
• "Virtual Academic Advisor" (Jadon Combs, Winter 2021)
• "Document Matrix Grouping" (Christian Rahmel, Summer 2020)
• "Bugs Need the Code: The Future of Computer Science in Bee Biodiversity Conservation" (Kristen Attebery, Autumn 2019)

Here is some good advice (from CSS 301) on making a perfect poster.
Now evaluate if you made a good poster as your advisor will be -- Poster Rubric

Suggestions for poster design are given at http://xrds.acm.org/resources/how-to-write-research-poster.cfm.
(Although these suggestions were published for student researchers, many of the ideas are also applicable to your capstone posters.)

Courtesy of the NASA Space Grant Consortium, are two worksheets:

• Quick Poster Checklist
• The Basics of Poster Design