With the ALA Annual Conference wrapping up, there are likely several librarians and library school students breathing a sigh of relief after completing a successful presentation. Super proud of your poster? Feeling like your presentation slides were on point? April and I would like to encourage you to submit your poster / slide deck designs for an ALA Conference feature post.

In the mean time, today’s post is a poster from a different conference: The Maryland-Delaware Library Association Conference in beautiful Ocean City, MD. Jenise Overmier, Instruction Librarian at American University in Washington, DC, created a great poster using a combination of Canva and Google Slides. Here’s Jenise in her own words:

I saw a presentation at the Collective Conference in Knoxville, TN this past spring that featured Canva.  When my poster proposal was accepted, my initial plan was to work with a colleague with a graphic design background as I have next to no design experience.  But then I remembered Canva and decided to design it myself.
I wanted to avoid cramming the poster with too much text.  Most of the posters I’ve seen at conferences are so packed that you can hardly read them.  It’s become a pet peeve of mine.  I also wanted it to feel clean and incorporate images to accommodate attendees who are visual learners

I started with a very simple Canva template and a wireframe in Google Slides.  Working from a wireframe really helped me stay on point.  I wanted to include just enough information to incite conversation.  I used Canva’s Design School blog to decide on a font pairing, added a few graphics from their free images, and some screen shots from the project I was presenting.  The screen shots were my least favorite part of the poster but I was pressed for time and couldn’t think of a better way to visually represent the project.

As I’ve mentioned before, visualizing research is difficult, so congrats to Jenise for creating a wonderful poster! You can download a PDF version of this design via the Librarian Design Share Google Drive.

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