Creating posters in LaTeX

During the last few months, I needed to prepare and present 3 research posters on Beacon and the Beacon Network for 3 different events (a standard conference poster presenting a paper, a poster introducing a project, and a sort of a more casual poster for a competition). I decided to write them in LaTeX, like the works they present. Naturally, I wanted to focus on the content, and reuse as much design as possible.

I was hoping to find a versatile, modern-looking template, which could, with minimum customization, support content of various extent suitable for the various venues, custom paper and font sizes, as well as both portrait and landscape layouts, according to the format required by the events. To my surprise, finding a template meeting these criteria was not an easy task.

In the end, I chose LianTze Lim’s theme. It’s nice and clean, but doesn’t completely handle all my various formatting requirements, and I found myself altering it slightly for each poster to better balance the layout. Real-life examples based on templates are always hard to find and modifications are rarely obvious, which is why I decided to share not only the actual posters, but also their complete source code. Feel free to take whatever you like from these examples, I hope you’ll find them useful.

Beacon poster from the Global Alliance Plenary Meeting 2016 (PDF, source code):

Beacon Network poster from ACM SPY 2016 (PDF, source code):

Beacon Network poster from ASHG 2016 (PDF, source code):