Are hand made posters acceptable in Academia?

You should present the best poster you can make

It is far easier to make a professionally looking, high quality poster using LaTeX or any other software than by hand-drawing it.

However, there are some really good artists out there who can manage to do a hand-drawn poster that looks better than a printed one could.

So don't use hand-drawing as a way to save time or money. A good hand-drawn poster is more work than any printed one.

If you are 100% certain that you can get your message across better with a hand-drawn poster, then go for it, otherwise use a printed one.

I am two days away from a poster presentation. I opted to write mine in Latex because a poster in Latex looks professional.

If you are totally confident that your content is so striking that no-one will pay attention to the graphic art, then write your poster however you want.

The risk in a hand-made home-crafted poster is that it will stand out for the wrong reasons: the medium will swamp the message.

The answer to your question is that such posters are acceptable in academia, but if you want to take that route make sure that your content is really, really good.

I have seen "handmade" posters from time-to-time in the past few years. It is a little surprising whenever I see them and reminds me of my younger days. Usually they are A4, sometimes A3, (8.5"x11" or 11"x17") sheets of white paper glued/taped to a slightly larger piece of colored cardboard. Sometimes the title is printed on a large format poster printer, other times the papers are taped together carefully. It is most definitely easier to travel with a poster like this. I have never seen anyone make a really nice poster like this or do things that you cannot do in LaTeX, PowerPoint, or Illustrator.