1.016  Design for Envir Issues

Printing at Parsons Lab

 

 

Getting Your Poster Printed at Parsons Lab for 1.016

 

Submit your file to Jim Long in Parsons Lab

Bldg. 48, Room 216F

If your file is under 25MB, you can email it to <jmlong@mit.edu>.  If it is over 25MB you can bring it to Jim via CD/DVD, jump drive, external drive, Dropbox, or similar.

 

36” or 44” roll paper is available. 

 

Parsons does not have a large-format trimmer available, so if you need a size that does not fit one of these dimensions (e.g. 30”x30”) you will need to stop by CopyTech or FedEx Office on Main Street for help with trimming.

 

 

Turnaround

 

The plotter is generally up and running 8am-5pm M-F, however Jim Long is the only operator and he occasionally isn't available. The sooner you can give Jim a heads-up on the number of posters you expect to be printing, their sizes, and when you’ll have the files ready, the better.

 

Printing is first-come, first-served.  Each poster takes just under an hour, though that varies by poster size.  Any files submitted after 4pm will not be printed until the next business day.  Keep in mind that poster printing does take some time - 8 posters easily fill a day.  If everyone waits until the last minute, there may not be time to print everyone’s.  Try to aim for a few days before your deadline.

 

 

Specifics

 

A very standard poster size is 36” x 48”. A poster of this size fits the space typically allocated in poster sessions, can be mounted on readily available presentation boards, and is easy to set up and print.

 

Although it is not the best layout program you could use, PowerPoint is a fairly safe application for designing posters. Other file types that can be accepted are Keynote, Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark, InDesign, and others.

 

The safest way to preserve your layout for the printing process is to make a PDF, which eliminates a number of common file conversion problems. Current versions of PowerPoint (both Win and Mac) will save a properly-formatted PDF at the correct print size if you simply Save As, and change the file type to PDF. 

 

If you are not able to create a PDF, just submit your file from whichever app you used.  If you have questions about your application's PDF export feature (some of them, particularly on high-end graphics software, allow you control over the file output), contact Jim Long at <jmlong@mit.edu>.

 

 

Setting Up

 

The most important first task is to make certain that your document is set up to match your final output size. In any application you will find Page Setup or a similar dialog that will allow you to modify your document size. If you are having trouble finding it in your particular application, do a web search on “[application name] page setup” and you should find a few leads fairly quickly. Once that is taken care of you are ready to start dropping in your information and designing your layout.

 

 

Text

 

Text sizes are fairly consistent, even when printing large. 11 point text will still be approximately the size of what you are reading right now, far too small for a typical poster. Keep this in mind when selecting sizes for titles, headings, and body text. How close will the viewer need to be to read your poster? There is some debate about fonts, but it is generally agreed that sans-serif fonts (such as Arial or Calibri ) are easier to read at poster scale than serif fonts ( Times New Roman ). Another common rule of thumb is: Sans Serif For Titles, serifs for text blocks .

 

 

Images

 

Do not drag and drop or cut and paste pictures onto your poster from outside the application, especially if you are using PowerPoint. MS Office applications tolerate drag/drop and cut/paste, but strongly prefer that you load the files by first saving the image in a common file format (.jpeg, .png, .tif, etc), and then using “Insert > Picture”.

 

Images taken from websites generally do not have enough resolution to print without some kind of quality issue. Try to get higher resolution files. Google Images has a very handy feature that allows you to restrict results to those of a certain quality level (click "Large" for the most useful results).

 

Do not use the image controls that are found in Microsoft Office (brightness/contrast; crop). They tend to be unpredictable when it comes time to print and can yield undesired results; and in some cases Acrobat will ignore these settings when rendering a PDF. Make all adjustments outside of Office (iPhoto and Picasa are good free image editors if you need one), and then insert your final images.

 

Do not forget to include citations for images if they are not your own!

 

Here's some instuctions for printing posters in Building 1.  Rebecca Fowler <rfowler@mit.edu> runs the printer.
You should give me at least 2 days notice when requesting a poster to be printed. She will need to know the dimensions of the poster and when you need it by.  PDF documents are the best, but Power Point will work also.

So, you should start to email her you plans  soon!