I recently returned from Minneapolis where I attended the AEJMC 2016 Annual Conference. I presented some preliminary results of my ongoing research about the efforts by China to internationalise its TV drama industry. Being a teaching oriented conference, most research papers at AEJMC end up being lumped together at so-called Researcher-to-Researcher Sessions, which is a euphemism for poster sessions. I think most scholars would agree that presenting our research during poster sessions is not the preferred format, but as conferences grow bigger this is definitely going to become a more and more frequent format. Since one of my papers at this year's ICA Conference in Fukuoka was also scheduled as a poster session, I spent some time online doing research on poster designs and effective ways to communicate research findings visually.
Finding a suitable template
While there some useful templates online (some universities, like XXXXXXX and XXXXXXXXXX have a few options available), I found most of them not suitable for the social sciences. So while we could all probably agree that there are no "one-fit-all" templates, I went ahead and created my own. I initially designed the template with Adobe Illustrator and then adapted the format for Microsoft Power Point so it could be easily edited. My main concern with most of the templates online was the lack of a cohesive design to link the different parts of the poster.
The result are two templates that are somewhat conservative. I know of some good initiatives to