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Designing Presentation & Research Posters with Illustrator

Learn the six basic tools for designing and creating posters with Adobe Illustrator.

Software Options

ScholarSpace supports Adobe Illustrator for poster making, but there are other options out there!

Adobe InDesign

Omnigraffle (Mac only)

Adobe Photoshop

Corel Draw (Windows only)

Inkscape (free)

Xara Xtreme (Linux, free)

**please note that to print a poster you will want your file as a .pdf, .eps, .ai, .jpg other file types may work, please contact us with questions.

Getting to Know Illustrator

Setting up the Poster File

To set up an Illustrator document as a poster:

  1. Open Adobe Illustrator

  2. Create a new "Print Document"

  3. Set the dimensions of your document as desired (48"W x 36"H is a common size, but check with the venue at which you are presenting)
  4. Open the "Advanced Settings", and set the color mode to CMYK
  5. Do not worry about any of the other setting in this window, they are what you want!
  6. Click "OK"

image of new document window