Center for Undergraduate Research and Intellectual Opportunities (CURIO): Tools for Images, Graphs, Illustrations

Including visualizations can help your poster stand out and help others understand your research. There are lots of ways to include visualizations on your poster - graphs, charts, photographs, as well as many others. Whether images come from the Internet, a database, or other resources, it's your responsibility to determine when, where, and how they may be legally and ethically used. 

Important considerations when using images and other visualizations on your poster:

• Make sure that you don’t increase the photo from the original size. If you copy and paste the image and it’s too small, enlarging it will only pixilate your photo and it will not print properly on the final poster.
• Photos as background images rarely look good. The image tends to overpower the text and make the poster hard to read. (If you must, you can fade out your image by using image editing software.) Instead, try using a background color or boxes to set off your text and images.

Many images on the web are protected under copyright and should not be used on a poster. You can legally use photos in four ways:

• Find photos that are in the Public domain or licensed as Creative Commons. Visit the Find Open Images LibGuide for recommendations on how to find open images. 
• Ask permission from the photographer
• Take your own photos

"David Wagner reviewing research poster closeup 2" by D Coetzee is marked with CC0 1.0.

Citations and Attributions are similar in some ways, but they also serve very different purposes. The following table provides a brief overview of the differences. 

Table from "Self-Publishing Guide: A Reference for writing and self-publishing an open textbook" by Lauri M. Aesoph, published for BC Campus under a CC-BY license