Motivational advice

The best general advice we can give a first-time poster constructor is to describe the circumstances in which a poster will eventually be viewed:  a hot, congested room filled with people who are there primarily to socialize, not to look at posters.  Because poster sessions are often concurrent with a "wine and beer" session, chaos is further increased.

Meeting organizers will invariably sandwich your poster between two posters that are infinitely more entertaining, such as "Teaching house cats to control invasive bird species" and "Mating preferences in extraordinarily adorable giant pandas."  In such a situation, your poster must be interesting and visually slick if you hope to attract viewers.

The trick to producing a great poster is to embrace the rough draft process.  Rough drafts are especially crucial in deciding whether you need to cut/add text or resize figures or fonts, decisions that can entail hours of fussing.  You should produce a rough draft at least one month before it is due, and then bribe several people to look at it when you are not present.  Ask them to leave small notes as on the poster shown below.  Ask them to comment on word count, prose style, idea flow, figure clarity, font size, spelling, etc.  Note that you can print a miniature version of your poster on letter-sized paper to get a very rough sense of impending layout challenges, but such a shrunken version is extremely hard to critique and you will lose friends if you ask them to do so.

Rough draft of poster with Post-It suggestions Photo by Colin Purrington