Librarian Design Share

Last month we featured a series of poster presentations from ACRL 2015 that demonstrated great design and visual representations of research and ideas. One of the fantastic posters we saw at conference slipped into an email abyss and didn’t make it into those posts, but we’re remedying that now.

Today’s featured design is a poster, yes, but we’re highlighting it today because it uses a somewhat unconventional material from a website that has some definite design possibilities. Allison Carr, Social Sciences Librarian, and Talitha Matlin, STEM Librarian, both at California State University San Marcos, used Spoonflower to print their poster on fabric.

Here’s Allison discussing their design process:

My default design style is minimal, which is reflected in the font selection, white space and few colors. I tend towards calming colors; we’ve used muted blues and greens for similar topics in the past and wanted to stick with these colors for our current poster. While I started with a solid white background, I ended up with a subtle pattern for visual interest. The two silhouettes represented the two of us in our process of critical reflection. We also wanted it to be easily read from further away to allow for more people to see the main points as they wandered through the exhibit hall. This meant we had to cut much of our original text to ensure that the font size could be as large as possible.

Lastly, while you can’t tell from the PDF, we had our poster printed on fabric through Spoonflower. We wanted it to be easily transportable, but were unsure about the clarity and crispness of the final printing. Many of our design decisions were made with this in mind. They had suggested specifications for size and file format (Powerpoint to PDF), which we followed. In the end, the printing of the poster on fabric was the same, if not better, quality of a paper poster and we were thrilled with how it turned out.