Title and Section Headings: fonts and colours

A bit of colour makes a poster more interesting, BUT DON'T GO OVER THE TOP.

The easiest way to change the fonts and colours used in the title and section headings is to create a small package that redefines the relevant commands. For example, I'm going to make a poster with a \Huge bold sans-serif navy blue title, the names of the authors will appear in \large sans-serif cornflower blue and the (sub)section headings will all appear in sans-serif royal blue. To do this, I am going to use my text editor to create a file called postercols.sty, and type in the following (download):

\NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}
\ProvidesPackage{postercols}
\RequirePackage[dvipsnames]{xcolor}

\renewcommand\@maketitle{%
  \newpage
  \null
  \vskip 2em%
  \begin{center}%
  \let \footnote \thanks
    {% set colour and font for the title 
    \color{NavyBlue}\sffamily\bfseries\Huge
    \@title \par}%
    \vskip 1.5em%
    {% set colour and font for the author
      \color{CornflowerBlue}\sffamily\large
      \lineskip .5em%
      \begin{tabular}[t]{c}%
        \@author
      \end{tabular}\par}%
    \vskip 1em%
    {% set colour and font for the date
    \color{CornflowerBlue}\sffamily\large \@date}%
  \end{center}%
  \par
  \vskip 1.5em}

\renewcommand\section{%
\@startsection{section}{1}{\z@}%
              {-3.5ex \@plus -1ex \@minus -.2ex}%
              {2.3ex \@plus.2ex}%
              {\color{RoyalBlue}\sffamily\Large\bfseries}}
\renewcommand\subsection{%
\@startsection{subsection}{2}{\z@}%
              {-3.25ex\@plus -1ex \@minus -.2ex}%
              {1.5ex \@plus .2ex}%
              {\color{RoyalBlue}\sffamily\large\bfseries}}

\endinput

Notes:

• All L^ATEX2_e packages should start with \NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}

• You need to declare the name of the package. This is just the file name without the .sty extension: \ProvidesPackage{postercols}

• The xcolor package provides driver-independent access to several kinds of colour tints, shades, tones and colour mixtures. The option dvipsnames allows the use of the dvips colour names (e.g. RoyalBlue). So the fact that I want to use PDFL^ATEX rather than L^ATEX won't make a difference.

• I copied the definition of \@maketitle from the article class file (which is loaded by the a0poster class file) into postercols.sty, and edited it to use colour and fonts of my choice.

• Similarly, I copied the definition of \section and \subsection from the article class file into postercols.sty and edited the font declarations.

• My poster isn't going to go lower than sub-sections, so I haven't bothered to redefine \subsubsection and \paragraph, but they can be similiarly redefined.

• You should use the command \endinput to indicate the end of the package.

I then created a document called poster.tex that looked like (download):

\documentclass[a0,landscape]{a0poster}

\usepackage{mathptmx}
\usepackage[scaled=.90]{helvet}
\usepackage{courier}
\usepackage{postercols}

\title{A Sample Poster Created Using \LaTeX}
\author{Nicola Talbot\\
School of Computing Sciences\\
University of East Anglia\\
Norwich, Norfolk. NR4 7TJ
\and
Gavin Cawley\\
School of Computing Sciences\\
University of East Anglia\\
Norwich, Norfolk. NR4 7TJ}
\date{}

\begin{document}
\maketitle
\thispagestyle{empty}

\section{Introduction}
This is a sample poster.

\end{document}

(View the resulting document.)