As far as printed materials go, posters have long been amongst the most creative and genre-defining. For everything from rock n’ roll posters to major film releases, posters have had a tremendous cultural impact and it’s possible to recreate for your own home or workplace.
Perhaps the most obvious reason why posters lend themselves so well to creative designs is simply due to their size. There’s a lot of real estate to play around with, allowing creative types to unleash their most clever and eye-catching designs.
Whether you’re designing a poster for hanging up on your walls at home or you operate a business looking for creative design ideas for marketing your product/service, here are a few helpful tips to make stunning posters:
Fonts and typology are ripe areas to experiment with on posters. Unless you’re a masochist who uses Comic Sans for your emails and other written content, chances are you’ll probably want to stick with a font that’s neutral and safe. For posters, however, you can really make a tremendous impact. Think of iconic fonts used for blockbuster films like Star Wars or Indiana Jones, or perhaps of fonts used on promotional posters for Spaghetti Western films like A Fistful of Dollars.
Many fonts are protected by copyright, but some are available for free to download and use without a commercial license. Make sure that you have commercial licensing if you intend to use a font for promoting your business product/service.
With so much space to experiment with, don’t feel the need to clutter it all up with graphics and content – unless you’re going for a maximalist style, of course. Sometimes, less is more. Make clever use of white space to really bring out certain elements like a big central photo or element that’s meant to be the focal point of attention.
For posters, you can get away with a lot of uniquely creative twists on incorporating shapes and other elements as well as graphics and photo content. Depending on the aesthetic style you’re going after, you can be quite bold and use all sorts of filters, details, and embellishments to make your poster stand out.
With many graphic design programs, both free and subscription-based, you’re often able to play around with various layers and even use templates to help you get the layout just how you want it. Many also have predefined shapes and elements you can use or tinker with to create a poster that’s truly unique.
Again, since posters are quite large and are often meant to pop out, your colour palette plays a huge role in getting and keeping the viewer’s attention. For business posters, of course, you should consider using branded colours whenever possible.
For just about any other poster, however, you should consider looking up colour swatches and finding out which colours contrast and/or complement one or two main colours.
Designing fantastic posters can and should be an exciting experience and the choices are limitless, but when it comes to printing your posters you should seek out a print shop that offers high-quality printing in vivid detail at fair and competitive prices.
Print posters and more with Print on Demand.
