The poster I prepared can be seen here in pdf format. The source files can be downloaded also. The format is A1, portrait, with two columns of text/images. The title and author names span both columns at the top. In my own opinion, the poster is not bad. Certainly, it has no particular flair or imagination (and surely has too much text) but nevertheless I think it is reasonably presentable.
To produce the poster you need to use the following commands. To produce a pdf output do the following (needs bash shell, or alternatively you can do the epstopdf commands by hand):
for x in *.eps; do epstopdf $x; done pdflatex mickposter bibtex mickposter pdflatex mickposter pdflatex mickposterOR, to produce a postscript output file, do the following:
latex mickposter bibtex mickposter latex mickposter latex mickposter dvips mickposter.dviIt should be noted that the resulting dvi file is hard to view correctly (the figures look all misplaced), but the pdf or postscript files produced should look as they are intended (thanks to Marcus Garvie for highlighting this confusing effect).
The single best (as in most useful) link I got was Lars Nummedal's A0 poster page. His design is larger (A0) and landscape, but it was sufficiently clearly commented to allow easy changes. He uses the A0poster class (some other people do a lot of stuff themselves, which makes things harder to follow). Also very useful is the poster program, which can be used for manipulating and printing
If you wish to produce a more fluid/graphical poster, xfig seems to be the way to go. I wanted a quick solution, so I did not attempt this approach. However, it could produce very good results. A couple of the links in the next section deal with this technique. large format documents.