Biomedical Communications Unit (BCU)

Prices are based on square foot of printed poster, you don’t pay for extra paper used. There are no added service fees. All orders are printed at minimum of 600dpi. To calculate a poster price, multiply the dimensions of your poster in inches, divide by 144, and multiply by the square foot price.

For example: a 30” x 36” poster 30 x 36=1080 1080 / 144=7.5 square feet.

Note: We no longer offer water-based inks.

Paper examples can be viewed at BCU.

UV Protection Inks: All posters, banners and displays are printed with UV Protection Inks made to withstand indoor and outdoor light without fading. Depending on the printing medium, this ink will last 100 years on interior products and up to 9 months in direct sunlight.

Heavyweight Coated Paper: a thick paper with a non reflective surface. It’s sturdy but can be rolled into a tube.

Semi Gloss Photo Paper: a thicker paper with a semi-gloss finish, making it look like photographic paper.

Tyvek: a sturdy, tear proof canvas-like material. It is lightfast and waterfast which can be left outside in the weather. When used with UV protection ink it will not fade, bleed or smear over time. Tyvek is also a nice alternative to lamination on prints that are too large to be laminated.

Vinyl banner: a long term use, exterior product. This material can be used with grommets or wind slits for bridge banners, or banners used year after year.

Self-adhesive Vinyl: an exterior product used for sandwich boards, exterior signs, etc. Both vinyl papers will begin to fade in direct sunlight after 9 months.

Waterproof Paper: is a paper made of stone with a plastic backing. It is good for exterior short term use and will not watermark or wrinkle in outdoor sandwich boards, etc.

BCU can create your poster from scratch. Bring in your clean slides/photos, graphs/charts and text (typed in a word processing program) and any specifications for your poster session.

Please keep in mind:

• Text - client must provide all of your text, preferably in Microsoft Word.
• Spell check- BCU is not responsible for misspelled text.
• Specify - Bring any pictures or graphs you want included and poster dimensions.
• Design - requires one day to two weeks depending on complexity and preparedness.
• Charges - $45 per hour for labor intensive services.
• Time - Please allow two weeks for design work.

If you would like tips for designing the poster yourself, use the following link for excellent information on design and layout. An Effective Poster

Poster design tips  (PDF Format)

Lamination protects your poster with double plastic coating. BCU can laminate with glossy or satin laminate up to 48" width at $4.25 per square foot. We also carry a glossy dry erase laminate allowing for use with erasable markers. This laminate is $4.50 per square foot.

Displays are laminated with JetGuard Crystal Matte Satin Laminate. This is 6 mil, UV protectant plastic specifically made for non-glare viewing from all directions. Our laminates are all highest quality SEAL products.

Lamination requires one extra day in turn-around times. Click here for Policies and Payment information. As with poster size, we can only laminate up to 52” wide and 50 /100’ long.

Mounting your poster to substrates ensures stability and allows the poster to stand upright with minimal support. This is a great attribute for displays, conventions, showcases, etc. Our mounting process requires the product be laminated the same time that it is mounted.

Mounting requires one extra day in turnaround time. Click here for Policies and Payment information.

The following chart is ordered from most durable to least durable.

We offer a variety of different accessories to hang, position, and protect your poster, display or banner.

• Velcro- in. hook only Velcro with adhesive backing.
• Plastic Tab Fasteners -adhesive plastic fasteners, attached to corners of banners, with loops for hanging.
• Grommets- metal rings placed within the poster material for hanging
  (used with vinyl banners).
• Wind slits- non-intrusive half circles cut into the design which allows wind to move through the poster. Prevents tearing and damage from wind
  (used with vinyl banners).
• Table Stands-cardboard stands with adhesive backing. Allow poster to stand upright on tables/displays (used with mounted posters).

Expandable cardboard and plastic poster tubes for mailing and hand carrying are available to help get your poster safety to its destination.

The four walking bridges on Stadium Way are commonly used for banner advertising. Bridges are marked in yellow. Click on map and bridge pictures to enlarge.

Bridge 1 connects to the McAllister Building near Waller Hall Rail height: 37” approximately. Space between vertical uprights: 8.5” center to center Total height: 42" approximately
Bridge 2 connects Neill Hall to Gannon Hall. Rail height: 12" approximately Total height: 51" approximately
Bridge 3 crosses near Smith Center for Undergraduate Education (CUE) and ends at Wegner Hall. Rail height: 28" approximately Total height: 72" approximately
Bridge 4 connects Troy Lane to the French Administration Building. Rail height: 39” approximately Space between vertical uprights: 6" center to center Total height: 78" approximately (The white banner shown is approximately 36"x 15’)

For information about Adobe Software programs and training tools and tips click here.

For information about WSU’s online training tools available to employees and students click here.

There are three classes of still image file formats; bitmap, metafile and vector. Many of these formats can be imported or opened in most graphics programs.

Bitmaps A graphic is composed of a collection of tiny individual dots or pixels. The simplest bitmapped files are monochrome images composed of only black & white pixels.

• TIF (Tagged Image File Format or TIFF) Developed by: Microsoft & Aldus
  A standard file format for storing images as bit maps. Especially used for scanned images because it can support any size, resolution and color depth. TIFFs are platform-independent files and can be opened on Macintosh and Windows graphics programs. Developed by: Microsoft & Aldus
  
• GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) Developed by: CompuServe
  An ideal web format for drawings and graphics. It is a platform independent bitmap file format. It is automatically compressed and viewable on most web browsers. GIF is a lossless method of compressing a file through a simple substitution method. The maximum compression available with a GIF depends on the amount of repetition in an image. A flat color will compress well - sometimes even down to one tenth of the original file size - while a complex, non-repetitive image, like a color picture will fare worse, perhaps only saving 20% or so. Problems: limited to a palette of 256 colors or less (transparent background available)
  Developed by: CompuServe
• JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
  JPEG is the best compression format to use on color images and its dramatic file size reduction makes it ideal for posting images on the web. However, its compression technique is a bit extreme. Although it can reduce files sizes to about 5%, some detail is lost in the compression. Depending on how much you compress the image, the algorithm throws away the less significant part of the data (the smaller curves) which adds less to the overall "shape" of the image. Unlike a GIF, you get to say how much you want to compress an image by. The extreme compression method can generate unwanted artifacts like false color and blockiness. This it is not recommended for line drawings and graphics.
  
• BMP (Bitmap) File format used by Microsoft Windows
  
• PCX (Paintbrush) Developed by: ZSOF
  Used for a PC Paintbrush program, PCX is a common graphics file format supported by many graphics programs, as well as most optical scanners and fax modems.
  
• PIC (Lotus Picture File) Developed by: Lotus
  A file format used for representing graphs generated by Lotus 1-2-3. Is supported by a wide variety of PC applications.

Metafile  This multifunction file accommodates vector and bitmapped data within the same file. Popular in the Windows environment, Apple's PICT format is a metafile.

• EPS (Encapsulated PostScript)
  A metafile format for graphics files designed to be imported into another application. This file type contains two elements: the bitmapped image and the PostScript code that tells your printer or output device how to print the image. This is ideal for printing files that have images and text in them. EPS uses a combination of PostScript commands and TIFF or PICT formats.
  
• WMF (Windows Metafile Format)
  A file format for exchanging graphics between Microsoft Windows applications. WMF files can also hold bit-mapped images. It’s a 16-bit metafile that can be used by Windows 3.x, Windows 95 and Windows NT to display a picture.
  
• PICT Developed by: Apple Computer
  A standard format for storing and exchanging graphics files. It is supported by all graphics programs that run on Macintosh and can be viewed in Windows based programs. PICT files contain bitmapped or object-oriented information.

Vector   A vector graphic is defined in terms of shapes. Each image file is represented by a mathematical description of the shapes that comprise an image. Vector-oriented images are more flexible than bit maps because they can be resized and stretched. Another advantage is that representations of images require less memory than bit-mapped images. Almost all graphics systems, including CADD systems and animation software, use vector graphics. Also, many printers use vector graphics. Fonts represented as vectors are called vector fonts, scalable fonts, object-oriented fonts and outline fonts.

• Postscript Developed by: Adobe Inc.
  A programming language that defines shapes in a file and outlines and interprets these by mathematical formulae called Bezier curves. Any PostScript-compatible output device uses the definitions to reproduce the image that's on your computer screen. This carries all of your font information, layout, colors, etc.
• DXF (Data Exchange File) Developed by: AutoDesk
  Almost all PC-based CAD systems support DXF.
  
• Fonts
  Many fonts are vector-based graphics. A PostScript is an example of a vector font system. Bit-mapped fonts must be designed for a specific device and a specific size and resolution. TrueType fonts are the most common and are supported by Windows and Macintosh.

Vector graphics take longer to display but can be scaled to any size with no degradation. Raster graphics are faster to display but image quality suffers when they are scaled up or down.

Note that most output devices, including dot-matrix inkjet printers, laser printers and display monitors, are raster devices. All objects, even vector objects, must be translated into bit maps before being output.

The difference between vector graphics and raster graphics is that vector graphics are not translated into bit maps until the last possible moment, after all sizes and resolutions have been specified. In their vector form graphic representations can potentially be output on any device, with any resolution and at any size.