Posters

[Billy Rigby]

I've been asked by someone who's booked me for a gig in May to provide some posters so she can drum up some interest.

 

I have a certain artistic bent but I've never tried anything like designing a poster before. What sort of things should I bear in mind? I imagine simplicity is the key - nothing worse than having too much clutter on a poster - but where do I go from there? Are there any programmes I can download to my PC that could help me?

 

I'm a solo act, performing swing songs if that's any help (I'm not asking for someone to do this on my behalf, just giving some general info in the hope it might help anyone who can point me in the right direction).

 

Many, many thanks.

[Andrew C]

Seems obvious, but make sure you get all the important info on there in big, clear letters.

 

What, When & Where? are the obvious ones! Perhaps price is less of an issue, once you've got their attention and as long as it isn't £ stupid, they'll buy.

 

Not difficult, but it gets screwed up so often!

[paulears]

Hi Bill,

 

I never had much respect for 'graphic designers' until I had to design my first poster. I'm now firmly of the opinion that you'll either have a natural ability and know what's good, or you won't.

 

There are a few rules - but they relate to layout and content, not the real ideas. The best posters communicate! At a distance, you can see the critical elements - who, where and when. As you get closer the other details appear. Standard multi-venue playbills have the venue space at the bottom - ready for overprinting. Cost of printing is pretty important. Single colour printing is cheapest - so black on a coloured background is the cheapest, but also looks cheap. As you add colours, it gets more expensive. Full colour CMYK is really expensve unless you want a really large amount! Colour photocopying is still cheapest for small quantities - in A3 max size.

 

I've not come across any software that does it for you - however, many have easy to use templates - BUT you still need the 'vision'. I've only ever produced one design that looks equal to what a real graphic designer could produce - being honest, all my other efforts were rubbish!

 

Do you have a college or university nearby? They may have students who need real projects to work on for Higher Level study - worth a go?

[Billy Rigby]

Thanks, fellas.

 

A friend of mine works in printing, she designed my business card and got a shedload printed off for me so I'm hoping I could pass the job to her. Not so much because I think I'll get it done free - I don't - but because I've been really impressed with what she's done before. If it ain't broke, and all that.

 

I agree completely with where you're coming from regarding graphic designers, Paul. I have a fairly creative bent that kind of blossomed in secondary school, but I don't have the discipline and eye for the dynamics that a designer would have. This is why I'm not really entrusting myself to get out the A3 and my isographic pens! If I could communicate my ideas to someone who knows what they're doing that would be quicker and more productive I think.

[musht]

MSword or openoffice to sketch it out then hand it to someone to tidy up, perhaps export it as a PDF for easy reading at other end.

 

Large format printing in even one offs can be suprisingly cheap,look on eBay , lot of wide carriage inkjets looking for work, and they are waterproof.

[Shez]

MSword or openoffice to sketch it out

 

I strongly recommend not using Word for anything at all involving graphics and layouts, even if it's just a draft. It'll look different on every computer you open it on. I've had drafts sent to me like that and it's incredibly difficult to work out how the author intended them to look. I've also seen the results of people sending finals to be printed in word format - missing fonts & various other anomalies. (Most printers won't accept .doc files for exactly this reason.)

Even MS Paint would be better!

[musht]

Kind of suspected M$ Word might be a bit proprietary, Open Office will export natively in PDF which is a bit more universal.

 

http://www.dopdf.com

 

Is a pretty good free PDF convertor, lives as an installed printer just print to PDF.

 

and Foxit is an excellent , small and stable PDF viewer

 

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

[AstonChief]

If you fancy something a bit more "designery" than a word processor you could always pay a visit to

 

http://www.splashup.com/

 

Essentially a lightweight web-based photoshop.

 

I've had to do a fair bit of graphic design for my present job and it's been a very steep learning curve! The best advice I can give is sketch out any ideas you have on paper roughly first, keep it simple and make sure the key information is the most prominant!

 

If you do decide to run it solo drop me a PM or two and I'll be happy to help you out where needed.

[djtom29]

Hi

 

As above realy! Keep it simple, Bold, Eye catching and not to many colours but not to few! also think about the finish you want! do you want glossy or matt?? large scale or smaller but more? what about a logo? and a masive banner to be displayed above stage/ outside venue? and what ever you do DONT FORGET TO PUT THE VENUE on. I was working on a gig for a friend and he didnt put the venue on the poster so I had a car full of pa/lights/camrers and didnt know were I was going! lets just say my dad wasnt happy when we found out we were on rong side of town!

 

if you are feeling adventurous try downloading a demo of Adobe Photoshop as its what I use to do most of my graphic work! but be warned it can take a year to learn to use everything on it and more than 10 times that to learn to use it effectivly!

 

im sure someone else will have something that is more usefull to you but if you intend to do this more than once then Photoshop is a must from me!

 

all my schools posters are designed in either Photoshop (which I have to say they do look better when time and care has been taken with them using this) or Microsoft Publisher but they arnt as attractive when they used to be done in this

 

good look

 

and pm me if you want any more info on photoshop or anythin else

 

Tom

[themadhippy]

You could try scribus, its legally free,and even exports as pdf files

[itinerant baker]

When I was promoting club nights I used to knock posters and fliers up in Word, which was fine as I didn't need anything too fancy (fancy is your enemy, especially if you don't really know about design) and was printing them straight away - this was years ago though, and I doubt I'd do it the same way now. One thing I did learn though was to run off a trial copy then pin it up on the other side of the (large) room and make sure it looked ok - remember, most people will be seeing it from a distance and for a very short time, the first thing to do is get their attention, then you can worry about the details.

 

 

If you've got a good designer to hand though I'd leave it to them (as long as they are actually good.)

 

 

 

Mies van der Rohe "less is more"

[Stutwo]

Try to resist using wordart - it looks cheesy and cheap. Have a google search for some posters to get an idea of a layout.

[itinerant baker]

If you find yourself even thinking about wordart (or clip art) then it's time to step away from the computer and let a responsible adult do it for you.

[Matt Riley]

I do a little bit of this on the side...

 

If you can afford the cost and learning curve then photoshop is the way to go (even though I'm a luddite and still use CorelDraw myself).

 

If you can't afford this then there's a piece of software for PC called gimpshop. GIMP is an open source, fairly powerful photoshop equivalent which has a pretty horrible interface, and gimpshop takes the okay software and rewrites the user interface to mirror adobe photoshop.

 

For stock photos, then try www.sxc.hu for loads of free, hi res stock pics. For fonts, dafont.com is the easiest way to get hold of what you need for free.

 

In the end, it's like sound engineering - you just have to have a picture in your head as to what you want it to look like, then have the confidence and patience to put it into practice.

 

In terms of printing, I've found djflyers.co.uk is really cheap and has a good quick turnaround and would recommend them.

 

Hope this helps a little bit,

 

Matt

[Bobbsy]

I may as well put in another vote for Photoshop here. I'm probably five or six versions back but, not being a professional graphic artist, the one I have frankly does all I need. If you stick to the basics, the learning curve isn't THAT bad--I bought myself a book, taught myself what I needed to get started and now use the book as a reference if I want to try something new.

 

Not being an artist, I'll typically get myself some sort of strong image (maybe from clipart or maybe by taking some kind of photo) then add extra elements and the necessary text.

 

The PDF suggestions are probably good, but talk to your printer. So far they've always been able to use Photoshop or Word files that I've generated. For small runs, I've sometimes just done a photo-quality print and had it colour photocopied.

 

Bob