This document is too brief, and is certainly not cannon, but only represents a selection of the things I have learned about research posters. Many of the ideas presented here go against the instincts one has about creating a scientific work, so it is good to review these ideas before you start.
I will refer to the poster "Evaluating Asynchrony in Gibraltar RAID's GPU Reed-Solomon Coding Library," which is available at IEEExplore. This may have been my most successful poster design exercise to date, although there are certainly flaws.
The idea here is that a person should be able to read your poster from several feet away. As an example, here are some reasonable sizes for print:
- Title: 86pt
- Authors: 50pt
- Section Headings: 60pt (bold)
- Text: 50pt
- Captions and labels: >=30pt
- References and acknowledgements: 20pt
If you have authors from multiple institutions, they often have their own funding statements and logos that must go on the work. Some institutions even require several logos, so don't finalize your poster layout before you understand how much space these elements require. Luckily, the text of funding statements can be small. Sadly, logos must be reasonably visible.
Rather than apply typical section headings, like "Introduction," "Conclusions," "Methods," etc., you can use that space to summarize what the section discusses. This makes your poster more efficient to glance over, and provides a good narrative if you're not there to present it.
Usually, you should not expect someone to walk up to your poster and get the full story without speaking to you. (This should be confirmed with your poster chair. Sometimes posters are judged for awards without the presenters present.) Instead, the poster is really a conversation piece that you can use to more fully explain your contribution. If you would like, you can include a link to (or a pile of printed copies of) an extended abstract that is the short-paper version of your poster. One single- or double-sided page should be sufficient.
Powerpoint, for all of its flaws, is an excellent editor for posters.