I'm polishing my poster for the upcoming Society for Neuroscience Annual Conference. It is just about the time when I relearn how much humans inherently underestimate the time to complete large projects. I had the the additional thought - The foundation of science is data, but humans are still the audience. It behooves everyone to make posters look "pretty." Software should support that goal with minimal cost (e.g., financial or time spent learning the program).
I have used a variety of software programs in the past to create posters. My first experience was using Microsoft's PowerPoint, the de facto option. It is hard to make posters look pretty in PowerPoint. Creating a slideshow with 1 slide that is 3X5 feet exposes nonlinearities in the software. I spend time wrestling with those nonlinearities rather creating content. I had a brief infatuation with Adobe, mostly Illustrator. There is inherent friction in that system that takes ~5 minutes to open. In my experience, it is too powerful for posters. Given my level of design skill acquisition, I need less choices and more automation. However, Illustrator can make things very pretty if you spend the time to learn it. Recently, I experimented with Scribus. Being an open-source program, it is free but has bugs. As with Illustrator, you have to spend time learning the program before making anything of value.
Currently, I use OmniGraffle for posters. It has the right number of features while being fast and easy to learn. You can create great looking design elements almost immediately. It is straight forward and quick to export current drafts to share with collaborators or the final draft for printing. Check it out if you want your poster to look pretty with minimal fuss.
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