Josephine's tips for poster making

Are you in the process of putting together your Oliphant Science Awards Poster? Check out Josephine's tips for poster making below.

Josephine Oehler is a senior student at Seymour College. She has placed entries in the Oliphant Science Awards every year since 2015. During this time Josephine has discovered an interest in photography and illustration that now has her placing multiple entries in multiple categories. In this article, from the SASTA Journal, Josephine outlines a little about what motivates her; describes the background to some of her Oliphant entries, and gives some tips on poster making, read more here.

1. Don’t pressure yourself into coming up with an idea right away. I often find that my best poster ideas come to me when I am doing something completely unrelated to making posters, and this may be hours or even days later. 1. Don’t pressure yourself into coming up with an idea right away. I often find that my best poster ideas come to me when I am doing something completely unrelated to making posters, and this may be hours or even days later. 
2. Start off with the message: each poster should have a particular message whether it is scientific or not. The message should drive the design of the poster and determine how much writing goes onto the poster
3. Be a bit experimental. There is not a right or wrong way to do a poster nor is there a set of rules for how a poster should look. Play around with different colours and fonts – what ends up looking good may totally surprise you.
4. Start with the background. This is my personal preference, but I find that the backgrounds of posters are often overlooked and yet the background can have one of the greatest impacts on a poster 
5. Sometimes with colour, less is more! Some colours are driven by bold and busy colour schemes whereas some look best with a very limited use of colour. For most of my posters, I start with near to no colour and as I continue to format them, I add more – however when I do so I try to keep the colours within the same tone; e.g., for the plastic poster, I used muted brown tones and for my Superhero of Science I used bright vivid colours so that Louis Pasteur’s picture would juxtapose the background.
6. At the end of making any poster, I like to step back, look at it and think: Would I like to look at this poster any longer (is it aesthetically pleasing)? Do I understand what it is trying to tell me? If not, I go back and rework it; sometimes that means removing something, making a font bolder or changing the shape of a graphic.