Find examples of good layout design. 

Your conference poster sells people on your personality, your work, and your research interests. When the conference is over and your faculty hangs it up to decorate a wall, it will continue selling your message for you. 

Magazines can serve as inspiration.

Why do we use magazines for inspiration? Because a poster is a designed artifact, and design sells.

Make it intuitive

• The layout of your research poster should be easy for visitors to follow, especially if it will remain up while you're not there to present. A common layout is columns that can be read from the top of the poster to the bottom and from left to right.

Build in plenty of white space

• For optimum readability, include plenty of white, or empty, space between elements. White space simply refers to areas without content - no text, no images. 

Use headings

• Just as the layout of your poster contributes to its readability, so too does the use of headings. Poster headings often look similar to the sections of a research paper (e.g., Introduction, Methods, Results, Conclusion, etc.), and their arrangement on your poster should make sense to audiences. For example, Introduction should always come before Results. The logical progression of each section to the one that follows will help your audiences navigate your content.

Pare down your text

• Your poster should not be overly text heavy. The amount of text you use will depend, in part, on how the conference or your professor structures the poster session. If you be will present at all times your poster is hanging, you can use less text because you will be available to explain your research to visitors. If, on the other hand, your poster will remain hanging before or after the session when you will not be present, you may need to include more text to make sure your poster is descriptive enough that visitors can follow along. 
• Aim for a total of 300 - 500 words. 

Break up your text

• If you do need to include a lot of text, find ways to break it up visually. Can you break up a big chunk of text into a couple paragraphs? If so, do it! Can you distill a paragraph to a bulleted list of the most essential elements? If so, even better! Is there an image that would go well between your Methods and Results sections? If so, add it!