How to make a conference poster

Before layout, think contents
Before contents, think about who your audience is.

>>8972848
Nice poster, I'm borrowing it.

>>8973715
Don't listen to them just copy and paste shit till it makes sense. Use pictures lots of pictures. Nobody's gonna read that shit

>>8972848
use BaPoster class for LaTEX, that's what we always use
http://www.brian-amberg.de/uni/poster/
http://www.brian-amberg.de/uni/poster/baposter/baposter_guide.pdf

there are tonnes of example files included in the .zip file which are easy to modify or you can just roll your own using the class modifiers. This is the golden road.

File: th.jpg (15KB, 201x309px) Image search: [Google]

15KB, 201x309px

Please stop doing this. Noone will care and you will spend 5 hours standing alone next to 200 other presenters who are just as boring as you.

Concentrate on meaningful research worth presenting.

For visuals, look at succesfull (aka. somebody else found it so good he decided to buy it) posters. Pic related, look up infographics.

>>8973758
It makes sense to you to structure a poster just like you structure your scientific work, but to a stranger, this will seem overly complicated and irrelevant. Try to get the message across asap, include the details but don't overly emphasize them, focus on the novel insights.

>>8972848
When I made my first poster I wanted it to not be too boring, so I put in a good amount of colors. I ended up getting a lot of shit for how distracting it was and was roasted by the judges (my advisor still makes fun of me for it, she told some admissions officers looking for posters to display to accepted students that my poster was "green but good"). Next conference I put minimal colors in and got much more positive feedback.

Play it conservative and accept the fact you'll probably not attract too many people at a conference since you're an undergrad (unless you're at MIT or something)

>>8973776
Foolish judges, a poster should only be judged by the amount of novelty and the quality of the research, not any arbitrary marks like "distracting"

>>8973783
Yeah I kinda agree but that's academia for you

inkscape to design

fuck photoshop

latex if your poster is simple but few posters are

>won't shame me
as long as they know you're an undergraduate they're not going to expect you to have the same amount of data or the same mastery of the material

>>8973758
What the fuck is that shit? That ain't no poster I've ever seen. Just copy and paste some results in and make it look pretty fucking done.

simple and no micro font. they're going to walk up, glance over it, and take as much in as they can in ~30 seconds. Powa point makes posters just fine, enlarge a single page and plug in your shit.

>>8972848
It depends on the subject matter, for the most part though you want to have pictures, diagrams, and some text explaining them with no flashy colors, if someone wants to know about your research they'll ask you and that's where you can start to properly explain your research and strike up a convo, or spill you spaghetti. Also don't talk about things you don't know about to impress others, they know the subject matter better than you and you'll only end up looking like a try hard fool. To calm my nerves I always just remind myself that no one is really expecting to much from me so it's okay if I fuck up and then I usually don't fuck up.

I followed this guide when I made my first conference poster: http://colinpurrington.com/tips/poster-design. I also talked with my undergrad advisor first, which you should do too.
I made my posters in powerpoint. It works, and it's generally easier to collaborate on a powerpoint document.
Stick to a plain design. Save color for photos and your organization logos. Use serif for body text and sans for headers.
Beyond that, just go for it.