Designing Around Poster Problems
Your teacher has assigned a creative project — Thank goodness you don’t have to draw anything. Drafting and writing a poster takes you less time than a paper, and who knows, creative design might even be fun you think to yourself. You grab your favorite images from google, color a few unique fonts to match the topic, and…. presto!
Like Frankenstein with his monster, you cannot bear to look upon your creation. Brightly colored text tries to scream above the chaos of imagery on the canvas. Both overwhelming and impossible to decipher, your creation struggles to communicate with everyone it reaches out to. Where did things take such a gruesome turn?
Well, in honesty, excess is usually the culprit. The most essential parts of poster design are an easy to read and well-organized space. Complicated imagery, color choices, and fonts can all add clutter making your point more difficult to get across. Your poster wants to communicate with an audience first and foremost, how you display your information will change how it is received by your readers.
CALLING ATTENTION
First, figuring out what type of poster you’re deigning is key. Most posters for classes will have the goal of giving a reader information. Other posters do more of an advertising job bringing awareness to issues, opportunities or meetings.
Posters with the goal of bringing awareness have more general guidelines. Because they want to alert people to something, their main focus should be to have large clear text to engage with readers from farther away. Since you should have a strong idea of who your target audience is, you just need to get their attention, not convince them. Big, bold (and legible) text is like a megaphone for posters. Short phrases and titles prominently displayed will draw attention and give readers the most important information right away. Some smaller, secondary text including additional information can be okay too, just make sure it’s small enough that it doesn’t pull attention away from the headline’s text.
BREATHING SPACE
Posters that want to educate the reader rely on text and images working together to do so. Blocks of text can seem difficult to read, and graphs can be intimidating to understand. Presenting all of this information at once without overwhelming or turning off your reader can be a challenge. A few visual tricks can guide your readers through your poster and make it more engaging for the audience. Breaking your information into smaller chunks can make it less daunting to approach and each section is likely to get equivalent attention. If you need to leave a larger chunk of text on the poster like a paragraph, it’s not a deal-breaker, just make sure it has space to let it breathe on either side. Simple imagery or blank space near a block of text and help alleviate how dense it feels.
FLOW
Display your information in a way that makes sense to read, anything from chronologically or in order of importance. In most Marquette classes, reading follows from left to right, top to bottom. Taking your organized information and displaying it in broken down chunks leading the reader from either left to right or to top to bottom. Since this is the way most reading in english is done, people will expect to follow the bodies of text in the same fashion. If the order your information still isn’t always clear, you can also use imagery to help direct your readers.
SENDING MESSAGES WITH IMAGERY
Picking out an image is arguably the most fun part of designing a poster. Should you pick something recognizable? Something directly related to the poster’s subject? Maybe something abstract that captures the poster’s message and mood? No matter what you decide, the image you select should have purpose. Something recognizable can pull in people familiar with the subject, if that’s your desired audience. Visuals that are interesting but don’t have much context might be intriguing but, also hold the risk of not having the audience understand the way the imagery pairs with your message. Context is important for an image, as well as the information it is beside but, the visuals of the poster can also provide movement as well as context. Images or designs that direct the viewer’s eyes in a path can be helpful too. Designs that assist with directing the reading can help you order paragraphs without having to explicitly direct your readers where you want them to see first, second, and so on. Designs that are circular tend to buy more viewing time from the reader because, once they make it through the information presented either at a glance or in depth, they’re encouraged to start viewing again from the start.
SIMPLICITY IS KEY
With people being bombarded by information every day, It’s hard to get people to pay attention to a poster, and most won’t offer more than a passing glance. That glance is your opportunity and with such little time before the reader keeps walking or chooses to ignore the print, its best to keep things short and sweet. With both text and imagery, it’s important to not complicate things to allow quick recognition as well as understanding. Keeping simplicity in mind will help your poster shine like a beacon to your desired audience.
