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At the end of October, BRI will be hosting an Immunology Symposium. We’re a non-profit institution so we’re always interested in saving money whenever possible. Rather than spend thousands of dollars having a design firm generate promotional materials, we opted to do it ourselves.

Click on the image to open the PDF version.

Summary

Our institution required an HTML email “save the date” message, a website, and a poster. This post is focused on the poster element.

The finished product was sent out to a number of institutions after confirming that they would actually post them. This  required some good ol’ fashioned phone calling.

Design

The overall design of the thing conforms to our existing promotional materials in structure, color-scheme, and typography. This helped to constrain my options, which I think is a boon to staying focused on content.

This poster is 11×17 in size and focused strictly on the content. Wherever possible, extraneous information was cruelly removed. The use of graphics was kept to a minimum and no free clipart was employed. I may not be a designer, but I’ve learned enough from the likes of Seth Godin and Edward Tufte to know better.

I used Adobe Illustrator (and nothing else) to create this. Even with my limited Illustrator skills, I’m happy with the results.

Here’s a quick run-through of each horizontal slice of the poster:

Element 1: The Header

This most basic, relevant information is displayed for the primary sponsor, the name of the event, and the dates. The images, while quite overused in our literature, is readily identifiable. And since I didn’t want to spend too much time on what amounts to fluff, I used what we had on hand.

Element 2: Overview

The left column went through many iterations. Most of my time was spent refining the data and ensuring that I used as few words as possible to get the point across. The summary paragraph on the right remained largely unchanged from what I received from my superiors.

Element 3: Registration & Speakers

The speaker list is an obvious bit. That always ends up on posters because people might see a name or two and become intrigued.

Beyond the registration address, I’m most proud of using a QR Code, which takes you directly to the registration page. The best part of using this 2d code is that people don’t need to scribble down (or just simply forget) the web address. They can scan and register really quickly.

The newest crop of PostDocs is quite comfortable with smart-phone technology, so I’m curious to know if they will be using the code.

Element 4: Sponsors

This is another standard inclusion for any poster. I’ve tried to keep the space to a minimum since it’s not the focal point. However, we obviously need to give credit since most of these organizations are part of our day to day supply needs (with one exception: The Immune Tolerance Network, which is not a supplier, but an organization we work tightly with).

Final Thoughts

I’m looking forward to obtaining some general feedback about how well we did with all the promotion elements. I’m still giving thoughts as to how I can get feedback without being intrusive about it. If you have any ideas, please leave them in the comments.