Best Free PowerPoint Poster Templates
9 minutes read
Quickly build a professional poster display with Microsoft PowerPoint using the templates in this tutorial.
You’ll find poster presentation templates available for free download as well as some great PowerPoint templates that you can use as a poster design template for PPT.
Importance of Poster Presentations
In the academic, scientific, and research communities, presenting your findings and research on large format posters during conferences is common practice. Often, these posters are set up with key research findings and lead into a discussion with attendees. A well-crafted poster can start the conversation the right way and get others to pay attention and participate in a discussion.
While apps like Adobe InDesign and Scribus dominate the professional layout world, PowerPoint is easy enough to use because you can quickly draw content boxes and fill them in with your key ideas.
Premium Templates to Save Time
Whenever I build a PowerPoint presentation, it’s rare that I start with a blank slate or with one of Microsoft’s built-in designs. Both of these options take more time and wind up with results that aren’t as good as using a pre-built academic poster template.
Free academic poster templates that are creative, professional, and well-designed aren’t easy to come by. Premium poster design templates not only make poster presentation creation a breeze but also set you apart from the rest of the presenters. This is something free scientific poster templates can’t guarantee.
Time is always of the essence. Gearing up for a PowerPoint poster presentation session is all about putting together your key ideas, creating visuals that support those ideas, and preparing to share it with others.
That’s why I turn to a couple of services that help me skip ahead in the slide design process. Using a template is as easy as finding a good starting point and customizing it with the details specific to your presentation.
One of these sources is Envato Elements, which is a flat rate, all-you-can-download site for creative assets. For a single monthly subscription rate, you unlock the entire design library, which includes everything from presentation templates to stock photos to video footage. If you find yourself regularly in need of fresh academic poster template designs, Elements is a great deal!
Another option for presentation templates is GraphicRiver. Instead of unlocking the entire library, you can choose files and purchase them one at a time. When you know what you’re looking for, GraphicRiver might be the perfect choice to just buy a single PowerPoint template that helps you make an impression with a presentation.
Envato Elements and GraphicRiver don’t have templates that are the perfect fit for the traditional PowerPoint poster presentation design, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t useful templates. Use a template from Elements or GraphicRiver for handouts or slides that you can give out.
Top 5 Premium Templates (Envato Elements)
Before we get into our free academic poster templates, let’s have a look at some popular premium templates that are icon and graphics rich. These templates will help you create professional poster presentations that are more visual and less wordy.
1. Graphic Infographic PowerPoint Presentation Template
This graphic infographic PowerPoint presentation comes with 1000 icon sets. It’s simple and easy to customize by adding your own data. Create beautiful and colorful visually appealing poster presentations quickly and easily.
2. Infographic Solutions PowerPoint Template
This is a multipurpose collection of more than 200 icons. You can copy/paste every infographic solution slide to your own presentation, and it’ll automatically change colors into new theme colors, making editing just so much easier. This well-organized template is easy to edit, customize, recolor, or change size.
3. Medical - PowerPoint Infographics Slides
33 unique slides and loads of features you can use for any medical research poster presentation. Perfect for those who want to present their findings in a simple and interesting way.
4. Chart Infographics PowerPoint Presentation Template
Here are 1000 icon sets at your disposal. This is a great must-have template as you never know when it would come in handy—especially if you’re someone who creates poster presentations that need a lot of charts and graphs to represent your findings visually with fewer words.
5. Environment Infographic PowerPoint Template
This PowerPoint template comes stacked with 20 unique slides of educational and science-related graphics and diagrams. If you’re someone who researches or conducts studies about the environment, pollution, or anything nature-related, this template is ideal for you.
Principles of Poster Design
Before we start designing our poster, let’s review some of the principles that make for successful posters.
The posters we’ll build in this presentation will typically follow a common format that you’ll see at conferences. There’s a well-understood format that most audiences will recognize:
- Titles: It’s not unusual for a poster to accompany a research paper, so it’s helpful to have an official title in case others want to reference or applaud the contents of your poster presentation.
- Introduction: A plain language version of your research findings is crucial so that anyone can spend just a few seconds and understand the purpose of the research performed.
- Methods and Procedures: Most research features a structured approach to finding the results.
- Results: Share the data that was an outcome from the results and procedures that you performed.
- Conclusions: Ultimately, share the findings of your research in a concise conclusion that sums up and conveys your outcome.
- References: If your research is built on critical assumptions, make sure to reference them in a section of the poster in case viewers want to cross-reference with other original works.
The research poster templates featured in this article typically have these key features. They might be labeled slightly differently, but the general placeholders are there. Just fill them in with your research work, and you’re on your way to a successful poster session!
Top Sites for Free PowerPoint Poster Templates
Luckily, there are many talented creatives and researchers that share their hard work in the form of free PowerPoint research poster templates. Many of these sites also offer printing services for the science poster templates. That’s helpful because the science poster templates are non-traditional print sizes that can’t be printed on most consumer printers.
Let’s check out some of the top sites that offer free poster templates:
1. PosterPresentations.com
Leading off, the aptly named PosterPresentations.com has a deep library of free download poster presentation templates in an incredible number of printing formats. Just click on any of the thumbnails to download and start customizing these PowerPoint research poster templates in over 20 sizes. You can also use this site to upload the finished science poster template and print the poster.
2. MakeSigns
MakeSigns offers some of the more modern design options in this PowerPoint poster template round-up. There are 24 separate templates at the link above, each of which has six different sizes and formats that you can print directly through the site. This best poster presentation template free download is easy to use. Just download the template, add your content, and prepare to print a poster that grabs the audience’s attention.
3. PosterSession.com
This site has over 22 different size formats for printing a PowerPoint poster template. It includes all of the standard poster sizes that’ll fit right at home on the exhibition tables of a showcase or conference. The simplicity of this design can focus the audience on the content instead of overwhelming them with unnecessary design elements.
4. Template.net
One of the best things about this selection of templates is their flexibility. There are eight different choices that you can use to set up your printed poster. The sections in several of the templates aren’t labeled, so make sure to use the list of suggested sections above to build in all of the proper content for your printed poster.
5. Microsoft Office Template Library
The Microsoft Office template library always has a useful set of starting points for your next presentation. You can grab a free scientific poster template like the Science Project template you see below for one of the best ways to build a PowerPoint poster. It’s one of the easiest templates to customize thanks to Microsoft’s attention to detail.
6. Craft of Scientific Posters
The PowerPoint research poster template format doesn’t get any simpler than the options on this site. All of these make nice use of white space so that the viewer’s eye follows the content from left to right.
It’s important to remember that keeping your free scientific poster template design simple is one of the most important aspects of a successful poster presentation. In reducing the number of design elements, the audience is more likely to focus on the content.
7. Colin Purrington
Colin Purrington is a Ph.D. and professor at Swarthmore. He also happens to be kind enough to share some excellent PowerPoint poster templates. They’re simple and easy to update.
Make sure to check out Colin’s excellent article on Designing Conference Posters. In it, he shares some principles that can help you succeed in designing the content for your poster.
8. ResearchPosters.com
This is another site that allows you to tie into printing academic poster templates with a printing service called Genigraphics. There are six major categories of designs, each of which has dozens of sizes so that your poster will fit in with the standards of any conference. Again, this is another great selection because the conference poster templates are clean, easy-to-update, and include all of the placeholders you need to present.
9. Call4Posters
For our international readers, this might be one of the best poster presentation template free download options in this article thanks to the dimensions that align well with the international dimensions typically expected at conferences. You can download one of these conference poster templates, customize it, and then print it through the same outlet that provided the conference poster templates.
10. Posters4Research
Make sure to check out the link above to see the sheer number of free scientific poster templates that this site offers. This site includes both colorful and straightforward poster templates that you can use to prepare for a big poster session. As you can see in the screenshot below, this best poster presentation template free download has all of the critical elements you need for a successful poster session that grabs your audience’s attention.
