This week at work is dedicated to getting two conference posters enough finished that my coauthors can critique them, with an eye to getting them printed in the first week in August. 

As a result, a fair chunk of yesterday was spent on the internet, looking at other peoples posters, and reading 'how to' sites. Yes, I've done posters before. And in Previous Job, at Other University, one of the jobs I had was looking at the draft (A3) posters the Honours students produced, and giving them suggestions on how to make them better. So In theory I know how it is done. 

What I couldn't quite wrap my head around was how to present a pair of medical studies to a statistical conference. This shouldn't be too hard, as I managed the abstracts - I know what it is that is my core message. I just couldn't work out how to braid the sections together. This morning I woke up with the idea of how to do this - not braiding at all, but running them side by side. This is going to give my two posters a visual similarity, which I hope won't detract, but will instead invite people to discuss both of them (I'm really really hoping I get spots side by side). 

In the various readings, I came across one site that I would recommend - Colin Purrington's "Designing conference posters". I don't agree with everything he has said, and there are certainly some tongue in cheek moments, but there is a lot of relevant information there. Also, he has an associated Flickr group, where people can put up draft posters, and get commentary (at least one of the recent ones he has commented on, although the most recent one there had no comments - I didn't look at the date on it).