Conference posters

I'm off to my first conference in a long time, and finding myself doing something I don't think I've ever done - putting together a poster from a qualitative project. No graphs, no plots, just words, interview quotes, etc. To aid me in this task, and to accomplish it with some level of aesthetic non-suckiness, I've been looking through the "How to make a less ugly conference poster" blog-o-sphere.

Yup. There is more than one blog that addresses issues of how to make a conference poster less crowded, overwhelming, scary to read, unapproachable, etc. Among the lesser hints I've read (which I have nonetheless followed by deciding I'll wear a faded denim color shirt the day of my poster): that poster presenters who are dressed in colors that clash with their posters get less visitors to their posters.

One blog I browsed for a bit: BetterPosters

And I will probably read some more of Designing conference posters. And who doesn't want to Pimp Their Poster?

After reading and browsing, I finally looked back at some talk slides and started designing. I wanted to keep the colors minimal but pleasing. I wanted to put some information in as icons instead of text, because who wants to read an article on a wall (this is what I find hardest at conferences...my brain just doesn't handle wall-mounted text very well). And I still need to add blocks of motivations and conclusions texts. Here is what I have so far, blue people represent grad students, red people represent faculty, and I need to add the notion of the American, Research I institute as my study site, to the lower left corner where my 12 grad and 9 faculty interviewees are represented - comment away!