Here I am going to walk through how to print a research poster on fabric using Spoonflower, a website where people can create and print their own fabric designs. You upload a design, and they print it on fabric and ship it to you. This site is mainly meant for people to design and sell their own pillowcases and things like that, but academics have discovered that it's also a great way to print out conference posters.
The information below is based on an excellent tutorial, How To Design a Fabric Research Poster with PowerPoint, by Dr. Angela Proctor of Codetta. I am mainly just walking through how I did it and highlighting the parts of it that are most relevant to my colleagues.
For the purpose of this walkthrough, I am assuming you already have a poster made, at the size you want, in either PowerPoint or PDF format.
Spoonflower needs an image file (JPG or PNG). So you're going to need to convert your poster file into one of those. In the process, there are two things you'll need to do to make sure the image will make a nice poster: set the right resolution, and make sure it's in landscape format.
Spoonflower recommends using images that are at least 150 dpi ("dots per inch"); I use 300 dpi to be sure. (If you're not sure what the relationship is between your poster size and dpi, see Sizing Your Design. The size of your image in pixels will be, for each dimension, inches*dpi. For example, if my poster is going to be 35" wide by 47" tall, and I want its resolution to be 300 dpi, then the image file will be 35*300=10,500 pixels wide, and 47*300=14,100 pixels wide. This will be a very large file!)
There are a few ways to adjust your image resolution:
The steps that we will be following later produce a poster in landscape format (more wide than it is tall), and I don't know a way to change them. That means that if your poster is going to be in portrait format (more tall than it is wide), you'll need to rotate it 90 degrees so it's lying on its side. Save that rotated image; that's the image you'll be uploading to Spoonflower later.
After completing the above steps, you should now have a high-resolution image of your poster (either PNG or JPG), and it should be in landscape orientation (either it was already a landscape-format poster to begin with, or it was portrait-format and you've lain it down on its side so it fits into a landscape-oriented canvas).
Next you're going to have to upload your poster to Spoonflower, choose the appropriate settings for printing it, and finally check out and pay.
If you don't have a Spoonflower account yet, you'll have to make one, by clicking the "Join" link at the top.
Once you're logged in to your account on the website, there are a few ways to get to the upload page. You can click on the account icon (which looks like a little person, on the upper right of the page) and there should be a prominent "Upload Design" button. Alternatively, you can go to your "Design Library", and there should be an "Add Design" button there.
From there, simply choose your image file, click "ok" or "agree" on everything it asks you, and wait for it to upload. Since this is a huge file, it will take several minutes. When it's done, you'll be at a design page, showing you a preview of how your poster would look on several different kinds of material. It will look like this:
The material we want to use is "Fabric" (for me, this is the first one in the list). Click the "Edit" button in the corner of that one.
In the page that's brought up now, under the "Repeat" drop-down menu, choose "Center". This will make sure your image is shown once, centered on the canvas. (If you don't change this, it will be repeating in a tile pattern, which is great for duvet covers and wallpapers but not so great for a conference poster.)
Also check the dimensions below this, and scale them if necessary to match the size you want your poster to be.
The screenshot below shows where these two things are in the editing page. When you're done fixing these settings, click Save to return to the design page.
Back at the design page, find the "Fabric" design again, but this time click "Buy" instead of clicking "Edit". This will bring you to a page where you'll select the options for the fabric you'll use.
Under "Fabric", choose a fabric type. I recommend "Lightweight Cotton Twill".
(Spoonflower recommends "Sport Piqué", but I don't like it. It's very light and soft, which makes it easy to travel with, but it's kind of droopy/saggy when you try to hang it—it just doesn't look very nice hanging up. Furthermore, it's a bit stretchy; this means that when you try to pull it taught to keep it from sagging, your figures and text can get kind of warped. For these reasons, I have stopped using that fabric. Since then I have tried Lightweight Cotton Twill instead and it's stiffer, which I prefer.)
Under "Size", choose 'Yard 56" x 36"'.
Once that's done, add it to your cart and check out when you're ready. Enjoy your spiffy new fabric poster when it arrives a week or two later!
by Stephen Politzer-Ahles. Last modified on 2024-06-12. CC-BY-4.0.