Scientific Posters... ?

[Judgeneo]

I've been doing a summer project with my university in physics, and we now have to present a scientific poster for the open day this saturday (so needs to be printed on friday)

the trouble is that I don't have a clue what to put in it really, or infact what programs to use to make it.

The other guy I'm working with started the poster so I have a starting point to work on, he used powerpoint for this, don't know why but it seems to work anyhow.

The programs I have at my disposal are openoffice and paint.... So far the poster has a picture of the experiment, some text outlining the purpose and what we did, as well as the references.

Any advice tips and trick will be more than welcome. (will be printed A0 if that helps)

 

[Inquisitor]

I did something similar on my course. We were required to use LaTeX for the typesetting, which is possibly not the ideal choice but nonetheless does the job (plenty of the staff in my department use it for this purpose). It's certainly better than using PowerPoint, at any rate.

Picking up LaTeX is worth it in the long run since it's the de facto typesetting system in academia (and you'll most likely encounter it later in your course anyway), but it has a steep learning curve, so if you're short of time it might not work out. If you want to give it a shot, then this might help (for posters specifically):

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/robert/posters/

This was the end result I arrived at by following his examples and tweaking it a little:

http://will.vousden.me.uk/stuff/files/poster.pdf

It's a little scruffy and unpolished but it does the job.