Introducing
Introducing posterly
What it is, how it's built and designed, and how we refine it with you until it's right, then the balance.
The paper got in. Then, the night before the deadline, it hits you: there's no poster. So instead of getting any rest, you give up on designing anything, pour the whole paper onto one giant sheet packed wall to wall, and call it a poster. We built psterly so that doesn't have to happen.
Making a poster is its own separate job, and it always lands when you have the least time for it: a template that won't behave, text shrunk to fit, a figure that won't sit still, columns that refuse to line up. None of it is the research — it's a day of fiddly chores.
posterly turns your paper into a poster you can proof, edit, and send to print — designed, typeset, and checked — without you wrestling with a template or a drawing tool.
What it does
You upload your paper (LaTeX source as a zip or tar.gz, or a Word .docx) and pick a size. Add a venue and a logo if you have them; you don't have to. What comes back is a finished poster. How it looks depends on the paper: layout, palette, and type are put together fresh for each one (more on that below). Whatever the look, the essentials stay — the paper's real claim, the figures that carry it, math set properly, your name, and where to find the paper.
A poster is a web page, built for print
posterly doesn't squeeze your paper into a poster template. It builds one HTML/CSS document for the exact canvas you choose, then renders it to a print-ready PDF with headless Chromium.
That detail does real work. A 48×36-inch poster isn't an A0 page scaled until it looks close. The page is declared at print size (@page { size: 48in 36in }) and Chromium prints a PDF at exactly that canvas. And the source stays editable to the end: trim two words from a title, give a caption more room, re-balance a column — every one of those is a change in HTML/CSS, not a fight with a drawing tool.
We use HTML/CSS instead of a LaTeX poster class (tikzposter, beamerposter, and the like) because the hard part of a poster is layout, and the web has the better tools for it: grid, flexbox, web fonts, balanced wrapping — and a proofing loop measured in seconds (edit, refresh, look) instead of the recompile, read-the-log, reopen-the-PDF wait.
The bigger advantage is that once the poster is a rendered page, layout becomes something a machine can check. Is this column overflowing? Did the footer collide with the body? Did a figure render at zero size? None of these needs a human eye going over the sheet pixel by pixel; you measure.
Two kinds of checking
So posterly splits the checking in two.
Layout and geometry go to deterministic gates. After every render, automated checks read the page back: column balance, clearance to the footer, the poster squared to the page, broken or zero-size images, stretched figures, typographic widows, blank space padding out a card, leftover LaTeX, a missing local image. They never ask a model whether the poster looks good; they return repeatable failures that have to be fixed.
Whether the meaning holds is a different kind of question — no ruler catches it; someone has to actually read the paper. That work is split between two models. Claude Opus, Anthropic's flagship, reads your actual source and builds the poster from the paper itself, so the numbers, equations, and claims come from your file, not from a model's memory. GPT, the latest release, then reviews the work twice — once when the content is settled, again on the finished poster — reading cold each time, hunting for what measurement can't catch: a figure that lost its axis labels, an equation that wrapped into nonsense, a claim that came out stronger than the paper supports. We always run each family's newest flagship, never a cheaper tier. (Equations are set as real math with MathJax, not pasted in as pictures.)
That makes the build a proofing loop, not a one-shot: build, render, run the gates, fix what they flag, render again, until everything clears. Most of the work isn't the first draft; it's the rounds that follow.
What makes a poster look designed
The gates can make sure a poster is correct and legible. Whether it looks designed is another question. With a house template, the habits begin to show after a few posters: a white ground and soft cards, the winning row picked out in the usual highlight color, a familiar label parked in a familiar corner. Each poster looks fine on its own. By the fifth one down the aisle, though, you recognize the tool before you notice the paper.
For each paper, posterly puts the design together afresh. Its main parts can vary independently: the layout skeleton, canvas, colors that carry meaning, type, the way headings meet their cards, and the masthead and footer. Each poster gets a one-line direction: “midnight editorial”, “engineering blueprint”, or “archival index card”. Every later choice answers to that direction, keeping the sheet from feeling like a pile of defaults. Each poster has a single visual lead. It might be an oversized number, a masthead that makes a statement, or the figure the paper turns on. The rest stays one register quieter.
The gates still set the floor. Variety is no use if it makes the poster harder to read, so contrast, type sizes, and layout rules are measured just as before. We also keep de-fingerprinting light. It targets the small repetitions that can give generated work away, including recurring emphasis colors and fixed labels.
The upload page carries a design-direction panel: set the layout skeleton, background, brand colors, or type feel if you have an opinion; leave the rest on auto and posterly composes them for your paper. Anything finer goes in the special-requests box, in plain words.
You pay the balance only when it's right
You get a watermarked preview, and you check it the way you'd check a print proof: the numbers, the names, the figures. Only when it's right do you approve and pay the balance; then the clean, print-ready PDF arrives, with the editable HTML source. An itemized receipt for whatever you've paid is available any time; you don't have to wait for the balance. Not right yet? Ask for a revision; you pay only what the model run costs.
What stays yours
All of it. You keep every right to your work; we claim none. Generation runs in an isolated workspace that reads only what you upload and can't browse the web or pull in anything on its own. Your source goes to the models that build and review it, and nowhere else: it isn't published, indexed, or shared, and no finished file leaves before you approve it. The preview is a watermarked, low-resolution PNG; the clean, print-ready PDF and the editable HTML source are delivered once you sign off.
The engine that builds the poster is open source (AGPL-3.0), so it isn't a black box. What you pay for is the managed run around it: the isolated workspace, no dependencies to install, the layout gates, the independent GPT review, and the finished files delivered to you.
Your research, designed to be seen.
Upload a paper and see for yourself. You pay the deposit up front, and the rest only after you've seen the preview and approved it.