I’ve done a number of conference presentation posters in the past seven years, and when I was asked to produce one for the first time, I did the usual ‘of course! no problem’ followed by a sneaky search on Google find out what the hell they are.
Some conferences have a poster presentation component, where participants will present an overview of their project on a poster (usually around a metre square) that is displayed during the conference. They allow delegates to get a quick overview of each project even if they were unable to attend the presentation, and provide contact details of the project coordinators.
The posters are often judged and awarded prizes. The judging is not so much based on the design, rather the content and the value of the project. They are an interesting design challenge because they are text and graph heavy, and the hierarchy of the information needs to be structured correctly to maximise their impact. I often edit the layout and text to achieve this, and in the case of the Open Disclosure poster, I wrote the poster copy from the client’s presentation, as she had run out of time preparing for the conference.
