How to Design a Poster that Works for You
“What does that say?” “This doesn’t make any sense.” “I can’t even read that from here!”
These are some utterances you don’t want to hear about your poster at a trade show or worse yet, at a sales presentation. To be sure you have an effective poster that people understand, you need to do some planning first. You might think it’s only a poster, but that poster can make or break you and your sales presentation. If it’s confusing, you won’t make a sale. If it’s understandable and helps you get your point across, you’ll get a great response: “That graphic really helps clear it up.” “That makes much more sense when I can see it.”
To get those kinds of responses, follow these tips:
Plan before you draw
Before you put ink to poster, you should make a list of everything you want to include on the poster. Not only how many photos or graphics, but the topics you want the poster to cover. Your poster should focus on one main idea so as not to confuse people that are looking at it. Make sure that all of your graphics and text support that main idea. For instance, if your main idea is how your customer service has used an innovative system for handling customer complaints, don’t mention how great your product is. Mention your product only in terms of your customer service. If you want to talk about your great products, create another poster.
Sketch out your design on a piece of paper
Now that you know what you want your poster to focus on, starting sketching a rough draft of where you want to put graphics and text on your poster board. Turn a piece of notebook paper sideways, or landscape, and sketch boxes of where an image will go and where your text will go. You should label your text boxes with a general idea of what will go there, like “title” at the top, center of the poster and “photo” in the center of the poster.
Design your flow
As you’re sketching, or perhaps after you’re done, draw an arrow to follow the path you want readers to take when they look at your poster. You can create a flow that goes down the left-hand column and then jumps to the center column and on to the right-hand column, or you can flow by rows. If you design the flow in rows, start in the upper left-hand section of the poster and make your way straight over to the right, and then down to the next row. Make the flow logical. Now is not the time to confuse people by having them find the next part of the puzzle to read. If needed, number your poster sections so people can easily tell what to look at next.
Get your final sketch on the poster
If you’re doing the poster yourself, just assemble all the final pieces onto the poster board. If you’re having a professional printing company do the printing for you, give them your sketch and say you want it exactly like you have it planned. Don’t let them take the liberty of switching things around because they think it’ll look better.”
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