Quickly making posters with PosterGenius

It is time to revive Fellgernon Bit from it’s deep hibernation period. A couple of very motivated Ph.D. students from my department (John, Alyssa, Amanda, Jean-Philippe, Elizabeth, etc) are organizing a blogging group. The idea is to review ideas, give suggestions, learn blogging technicalities, write blog posts, review them, and post them. It’s a great idea! Plus it should us keep our blogs active.

So for my first post I am going to talk about PosterGenius. It’s a simple to use piece of software for making posters. In my case, I presented a poster at the 7th Annual Young Investigators Symposium and Poster Session on Genomics and Bioinformatics. It was a relatively small event and I had a limited amount of time to make the poster. The idea behind PosterGenius is that you separate your poster into several sections (intro, methods, results, references), have some material for each (text and or figures), and just have to put it together with a simple background.

Of course, there are plenty of other tools for doing this. But in my case, I was able to make a poster in lunch hour by using slides from a presentation on the same subject and just organizing the content. The basic steps are:

  1. Choose a poster template, number of columns, height and width.
  2. Choose how many sections and their titles.
  3. Fill in the authors, affiliations, title and institutional logos.
  4. Enter the pictures using their picture manager. You might have to choose the appropriate size of the pictures (zoom percent). For example, my slides had white space on the borders, which PosterGenius did not know, so some space was being wasted.
  5. Review it.
  6. Print it.

In the following post you can find some pictures from the creation of the poster in question.

PosterGenius has the cool feature of creating a poster, a presentation, and a handout from the same material. For other meetings, I have actually printed out a couple of handouts to give to those interested in the material.

While it is not free (they have discounts for students), I think that PosterGenius is a very simple to use, produces good looking posters, and their optimal distance to read feature is quite accurate.

Leonardo Collado-Torres
Leonardo Collado-Torres
Investigator @ LIBD, Assistant Professor, Department of Biostatistics @ JHBSPH

#rstats @Bioconductor/🧠 genomics @LieberInstitute/@lcgunam @jhubiostat @jtleek @andrewejaffe alumni/@LIBDrstats @CDSBMexico co-founder

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