I found this old thread I had remember reading a few years ago. This should be really helpful to you.

Here is a link that might be useful: islands with posts

10K Diamond has a beautiful kitchen. I don't remember if her columns are load bearing or not. Hopefully she won't mind me posting her pic.

My advice may not be what you're looking for but just giving my two cents. Our old kitchen layout incorporated the post into The island and it was not the ideal placement. We toyed with the idea of an l shaped island but ultimately decided that a rectangular one would provide the look we wanted and not disrupt traffic flow like and l-shaped one would. We thought the standalone post would really bug us but it doesn't at all. We capped it with crown and baseboards so it looks like more of an architectural feature.

Old:
{{!gwi}}

New, view from family room to kitchen.

Not sure this will be helpful but I will share what happened when we took the wall out between our kitchen and dining room. Instead of puting a post to support we reduced the length of the opening between the two spaces and dropped the ceiling a bit to put in a thick engineered beam to support the ceiling. So there is a transition space between the rooms where the space is narrower than the rooms, therefore the length of the load the ceiling beam had to carry was shorter not requiring an additional support.

I don't know if it makes sense and unfortunately I don't have a good photo. Just imagine a small "transition space" between the rooms, much larger than a doorway (9 feet in this case) but smaller than the full width of each space. Just another option.

We're knocking down two walls so we're creating an interesting header with a steel support hidden in that dropped down section of the ceiling...it's a big span, so it can be done!