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Hello every one, today we will be discussing which program to use to make scientific posters.
You don't have much choice here, but I see frequently people screwing this up.
Let's go over potential programs that people are frequently using.
First we have normal powerpoint, you can also get this fro free if you use
Open office, LibreOffice or StarOffice.
and then we have three Adobe programs.
We have Adobe Photoshop,
Adobe Illustrator
and Adobe InDesign.
So which program should you use?
Well actually powerpoint is not that bad
most people are already familiar with powerpoint.
And if you create a big spread in the beginning
you can align all your objects on the spread and it's quite simple to use.
So if you don't have much time for your poster
and you want to have still a decent poster
it's totally fine to use powerpoint.
However as powerpoint is not supporting any vector graphics
you should make sure that all your pictures
are really big and have a heigh resolution (dpi).
If people are interested I will also make a tutorial and show you
how to use powerpoint to make your poster.
Then we have the other three programs from Adobe.
Let's talk about the obvious bad choice here
this is of cause photoshop.
As the name says it's fro photos
and we want to make a poster.
And the problem with photoshop is that it is pixel based
so you would need to put out
the actual poster for print in a very big resolution to get it to print nicely.
Also photoshop doesn't support text very well.
So for a movie poster photoshop is very nice
but for a scientific poster with quite some text and some lines
and figures and so on
photoshop should never be considered for making a poster.
Then we are left with InDesign and illustrator.
And quite often people use Illustrator.
And to be honest, that is not a very bad choice
however we have some specific problems with illustrator.
First wen don't have spelling correction.
And then also some text features
with text kerning, so the spacing between letters
and things like that so the really fine detailed things
are not very well implemented into illustrator.
Also if you want to use
boxes with rounded corners as it is used on posters quite often
Illustrator has some problems if you resize the boxes.
So if you pay attention when looking at some posters you can really tell
if people made those with illustrator and just dragged the boxes to resize them
and there where screwing up the corners.
So why should you use InDesign then?
Well InDesign works pretty much like powerpoint.
You have a big spread where you can place things on.
Also InDesign is very well made for text
because it's made basically for print media like magazines and newspapers.
And the really nice thing about InDesign is
that it does integrate very well with illustrator and photoshop as well.
So inDesign it self gives you the very nice text function and very nice boxes
that look very well on posters.
Also very nice features to align your elements on the poster it self.
Because it's a layout program for print, that's exactly what we need.
And the big trick with InDesign is
that you can take your illustrator file, so lets say we have made a figure or flowchart.
Vector based of cause so it prints nicely.
We put it into InDesign and then it actually gets linked
so now we have a complex figure in InDesign it self
that we would normally make with illustrator, which we actually did.
And if we now want to change something in this figure, we can just open the *.ai document
in illustrator and make our changes
and this will be updated in InDesign automatically.
The same thing goes for pictures that we make with photoshop.
This way our main document is not very cluttered
and it's still very very easy to work with.
If you would do the same thing in illustrator
we would get the problem that we would have all of our graphics in one document
and this can get very messed up with different layers and so on,
so we don't want to do that.
So I highly recommend using InDesign
and if you don't have much time and you are more familiar with powerpoint
there is also nothing wrong with using powerpoint.
Sure you can till use illustrator
but I think inDesign has some key advantages above illustrator
and pleas never try to use photoshop to make a complete poster.
So it's very simple; InDesign for the layout,
illustrator as the name is telling you only for illustrations
and photoshop only for photos.
If you keep those things in mid
(almost) nothing can go wrong with your poster.