Talk Series Poster Generator

Creating a good poster for advertising an event series can be tricky. Last year, I designed one for the Computer Club‘s Spring Talk Series. It worked well, and as I was graduating and leaving no one with significant design background in the Club, I wrote a generator to produce new versions of the poster for future talk series.

The generator takes in a JSON file describing the important parameters of the talk series. From the start date, it calculates out the date for each talk, on the basis that they occur at the same time every week. Talks are color-coded to fall into up to four categories, allowing the Club to suggest the grouping of similar talks on the schedule.

The poster is output as an SVG file, which makes it easy to apply minor tweaks after the fact, if necessary, without having to work with a heavier software package such as Adobe Illustrator. Fonts are linked from the Google Web Font directory, ensuring consistency across platforms.

The Talk Series Poster Generator is part of the TAPP project. You can check it out on GitHub.