Research Posters

Font/Type Size for A1 - don't use more than 2 fonts on your poster and try to use them consistently: for example, all headings in Arial and all text in Calibri. Avoid using unusual fonts as these will make it harder for your audience to read.

It's important to remember to utilise appropriate font sizes on your poster. As a rough guide:

• Title: 100-150pts (this may seem too large but remember, your poster is the width of at least two sheets of A4 paper depending on your chosen orientation!)
• Headings/Subtitles: 60 -100pts
• Body Text: 30 - 50pts
• Image/Graph Captions and References: 20pts

Colours - as with fonts, try to limit your use of colours: around 3 should be enough. Avoid presenting black text on a white background or using excessively bright colours as this can cause visual glare. Instead aim for contrasting colours where your text stands out from the background but isn't glaring - generally dark text on a lighter (but not white!) background.

The best way to check the contrast of your text and background is to use an online readability and accessibility checker:

• https://contrastchecker.com/ (On this website, you should ensure as a minimum that your text/background contrast meets the criteria for AA18pt and AAA18pt).

• https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ (This website allows you to input RGB colours straight from PowerPoint to check their contrast. Treat your font colour as the ‘foreground’ colour).

For example, we can see that this example of white text on a blue background fails the colour difference check - setting a darker background to enhance the contrast would improve readability:

If you’re not sure what colours work best together, or need some inspiration, visit www.coolors.co to generate coordinating colour schemes:

If you’re working in Microsoft Powerpoint (our recommended software for poster design), you will need to convert any HEX colour codes into RGB format. You can find a quick converter here: https://www.rgbtohex.net/hextorgb/