I have a feeling that no matter what the current state of the poster design is, it needs more pictures. More than 50% of the poster should be made up of objects that are not blocks of text.
I don't agree. Text as the primary content can be very visual with good graphic design. It's hard to find pictures that are informative and not merely illustrative. Non-informative pictures just distract and feel condescending.
An email from David Wood, organiser of the Humanity+ UK 2010 conference in London on Saturday 2010-04-24:
I plan to make such a poster, and I'd like the advice of people here. Trying to represent what Less Wrong is about in the space of a poster could be challenging. I have maximum space equivalent to sixteen A4 pieces of paper. In the spirit of not proposing a solution until you've had a chance to think about the problem, I'll put my current plans into a comment.
Update: looks like it will be Roko rather than me making the poster, but the same applies, your ideas could doubtless be very useful!