Edward Tufte has books and there are entire webpages about him, but this is how I would summarize rules of good posters since now I am apparently an expert. I'm sure there are different ways to think about it, though.
- Nothing irrelevant to the research, especially no clip art or background pictures or stock photos. At gigantic conferences, I saw the following examples: E.g., medical-related poster with a gigantic picture of a generic member of the patient population, such as a random baby or old person. Worse, but fortunately rarer: that picture in the background with the poster text on top of it. Still worse: a rainbow background behind the text for no apparent reason. Not fatal, but unnecessary: decorations along the corners for no reason, such as an ivy frame or a few different colors. Related Powerpoint phenomenon that I've seen even faculty do: clip art animations that are either irrelevant or tangential to the text. Once I saw a fire engine rushing across the top of the slide to douse a fire. Over and over again. And the presentation had nothing to do with fire or fire engines or emergencies.
- Tables are easier for the writer, but difficult to understand in the brief time a reader is willing to look at your poster, so use plots whenever a table would take a lot of time to understand.
- Very concise text. Strunk and White and then cut it down further. Just the text of an abstract explained can be an entire poster.
- Follow rules for good data display: e.g., no pie charts, no chart junk, no 3d bar graphs, avoid other bad data display issues.
- Organize the data for the reader: put it in an order that allows the reader to see patterns.
- Omit every mark that is not strictly necessary, e.g., most tick marks in enumerated lists.
- Use color to illustrate or organize your data and text, but not otherwise.
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