My first academic poster

Okay so this post is going to follow me throughout the design of my first ever academic poster.. This poster design is happening RIGHT NOW! I am currently sat here with nothing but a few scraps of paper in front of me, The poster is due in 2 weeks and I really need to get my ass together and get it done!

I got the idea to do this from http://winawer.org/blog/2012/07/09/memoir-of-an-academic-poster/ and I thought it would help me if I tracked my progress on this blog at the same time as creating the poster, coz for the past 2 months which I have had to do this poster I have done basically nothing.. The odd bit of research and note taking but it is all so jumbled and I am getting all stressed so my last hope is live blogging to keep me going!

Monday 12:00PM- I have started work but just planning at the minute, laying down my ideas on to paper this has helped a lot.. Even when I didn’t have a clue what I was going to put in what box I just logged down a basic outline and by doing that it got me thinking. So I made another and another until i was happy. I am still not happy but I am happier than I was. I have decided my next step is to get this thing logged down onto the computer so I can start laying text out.

Monday 2:40PM- Starting to lay this thing out is proving more difficult than I first imagined. I am still deciding on which program to use. PowerPoint or Adobe InDesign. I think I am going with InDesign but this means I am having to go through some tutorials trying to get the thing made.

Monday 3:40PM- The layout is starting to take shape.. Can’t believe it has taken 4 hours nearly just to layout a basic poster.. hopefully work will start to speed up once I know what is going to go in what box and so on. Anyway this is looking like my basic layout up to now..

 Monday 4:38PM- Think I have finished my first draft of the layout, obviously everything you see in the boxes is just random text, It is time for me to start thinking about filling these boxes! crap

Apparently the colours are meant to complement each other.. as someone who knows nothing about this kind of thing I hope they do!

Tuesday 8PM-So I have been working for about 2 hours laying out like 6 lines of code, I am really finding the layout way more complicated than what the content should be. For example how should I present my content? bullet points or small texboxes? what font? will my chosen font fit?

I have currently completed (I know I will revisit it as I think it looks shit atm) the top left box on the history of the national grid. I am going to get wolfram alpha I think and have a go at getting some of their graphs off.

Tuesday 8:40PM-Been playing around with graphics for a while and I realised that simply using the snipping tool on Windows is not going to work. I need to get my graphics into vectors, I tried wolfram alpha and excel but not sure yet.

Monday 8:40PM- LETS DO THIS Got 1 day left to finish this thing..

meant to do loads of updates last night but forgot. Meh doesn’t really matter, just blogging the beginning part helped me get my brain in gear, even if this is the worst blog post ever.