Posters can be an excellent way to boost your business and improve your company’s bottom line. Getting high-quality posters printed is easier than ever with online poster printing options and expedited delivery. This detailed guide on poster printing will give you everything you need to know to design, print, and utilize gorgeous posters for your business. With a little time and effort, you can grow your business and improve sales and marketing ventures.
Guide to Poster Utilization
Posters have a wide range of uses, all of which can help boost your business and improve your marketing goals. In fact, what you decide to use your posters for can greatly impact how you design them. It can also affect what kind of printing options you need. Posters can help improve your bottom line, capture people’s attention, and even organize your storefront or storage areas.
Posters for Sale
Selling posters can make some additional income and offer new products to your clients or customers. Some ideas for selling posters in your business include:
- Using your logo as the main design element, if it’s a particularly unique and artistic image
- Creating fun infographics of the products or services you offer (such as a best-selling titles list for bookshops that includes gorgeous cover art)
- Putting together a montage of your promotional materials with unique design elements
- Partnering with local artists and designers to create unique pieces of art to sell that also support your communities
By creating posters with unique elements and artistically pleasing designs, you can increase your sales and boost your business both online and in-store.
Posters for Decoration
While you can sell decorative posters for money, you can also use them to enhance your shop or office. Hanging up well-designed posters around your storefront can help you create a unique feel for your store that will bring in more customers. Displaying artwork that’s included in other products you sell (such as designs printed on T-shirts) can also help you secure sales with customers or clients.
Posters for Marketing and Promotion
Grabbing the attention of passersby isn’t always easy, but the right poster can help. Posters can be hung in your storefront windows, at other local businesses, and at conventions or other events to help catch people’s attention and get you more sales.
Storefront Posters
Hanging a poster in your window is a great way to get people’s attention and tell them what your store is about. It’s also a useful tactic for promoting any sales or special events going on in your store. By promoting these with a unique poster design, you can catch people’s eyes and bring more customers into your shop.
Local Businesses
Connecting with other local businesses not only helps you boost your company’s reach, but it also helps you create and maintain lasting business relationships. By teaming up with nearby companies, you can promote your business in their offices or shops and support your local community at the same time. Many local businesses are happy to connect with each other and offer support.
Pro Tip: When making business connections, make sure you are offering up support and assistance as well. If all you do is hang up a poster in their shop and call it a day, you aren’t making a real connection, and you’re likely to lose the privilege of promoting in their stores by not offering a return service in kind.
Conventions and Other Events
Attending conferences, conventions, and other events is a great way to promote your company and get more business. But standing out in a crowd of others doing the same can be hard. By using posters, you can grab people’s attention and direct them to your booth, table, or meeting room. Posters can help you tell people about your company and give them important information about what you do and why they should give you their business.
Posters for Organization
Keeping your storefronts, offices, and storage areas organized is important if you want your business to succeed. While there are plenty of options to maintain organization, posters are a fun and unique way to keep your inventory in check.
In-Store Organization
If you have a physical storefront, posters can be a great way to organize the space. With the right location, posters can help your customers find what they’re looking for and alert them to offers or new products they might have missed otherwise. Posters also allow you to get more flexible with your creativity. By designing unique posters to hang in your store, you can stay organized while providing your shop with a personal flair that customers are sure to appreciate.
Storeroom Organization
Not being able to find what you need in your inventory can be frustrating and ultimately costly. Spending extra time searching through shelves and boxes takes you and your employees away from other work that can help make you more money. With posters, however, you have a fun way to organize and label your storerooms or warehouses. And with the design options available, you get a unique and creative organization tool that will help brighten your storage areas and provide some fun during your work.
Having a clear idea of what you want to use your poster for is important. It’s a driving factor that will determine how you design your poster and what printing options you should choose for it. Taking the time to nail down how you’re going to utilize your posters will save you time in the rest of the poster printing process.
Guide to Poster Design
Posters will only help your business if they have the right design. A poorly designed poster is likely only going to hurt your business rather than grow it. You don’t need to have a degree in design to create a beautiful poster that will boost your company and improve your sales or marketing goals.
Image/Text Balance
An easy mistake to make on a poster is overpowering it with either text or images. A good poster will show off some key visual elements while also telling viewers about your business or company. If you have too many images, the poster can feel cluttered, and you aren’t likely going to keep the viewer’s attention. The same is true with too much text. If you have large blocks of text on your poster, not many people are going to stick around to read it. The key to a good poster design is a mix of text and images. You want to capture people’s attention with images and drive the point home with text.
Pro Tip: Posters that are being sold or used for artistic purposes don’t need to follow the same rule. These should be mostly image-based, with only a small amount of text if it’s included in the design.
Color Scheme
Having an aesthetic display will help your posters get noticed and attract customers or clients to your business. Part of building an aesthetically pleasing poster display is using the proper color scheme. The right color palette will draw people in and get your company noticed. There are, however, a couple of different ways to pick out your poster’s color scheme.
Brand Integrity
Maintaining brand integrity in any promotional campaign is always a good idea. By using the same colors already used in your logo or other marketing objects, you can help viewers easily identify your company when they see your poster. If you don’t have a color scheme for your company yet, designing your posters with the right palette can be a great place to start.
Complementing Colors
For posters that are being sold or displayed for artistic reasons, you’re going to want to try and use as many complementary colors as possible. These colors provide little contrast to one another. Instead, they help bring out the natural vibrancy or hue of each other. Complementary colors will help your poster achieve an aesthetically pleasing design that will attract customers and clients.
Contrasting Colors
Designing with contrasting colors, on the other hand, will also create an attention-grabbing effect. Contrasting colors oppose each other, creating stark contrasts on your poster. This upset between colors makes your poster stand out even more, helping to accentuate specific sections by making them pop out at viewers. While this effect can be useful, be careful not to overdo it. Too much contrast on your poster can make it difficult for viewers to stare at it too long, which can lose you potential business.
Having the right color scheme is key to designing posters that attract new customers or clients to your company.
Font and Legibility
For posters that do use text in their design, it’s imperative that that text is legible. Having a fancy font may seem like a good idea, but it can backfire if no one can read what your poster says. Posters are often initially seen at a distance, and you want your viewers to be able to read what it says. Using a Sans Serif font can help grab their attention, even across a street or in a crowded room. The most commonly used fonts for posters include:
- Arial
- Helvetica
- Verdana
Pro Tip: Decorative fonts can be utilized on posters as well, with some limitations. Generally, the larger the font is, the more likely you are to get away with a more decorative font. Just be sure to avoid fonts where one letter can be mistaken for another to avoid any confusion.
Hiring a Designer
Sometimes, hiring a professional designer is the best way to get the poster you want to help boost your business. A hired designer will have the schooling and practice needed to create amazing poster designs you can use to build up your company. Many poster printers provide optional in-house design aid. With this option, you can send your ideas, needs, and any images or text you want on your poster to your printing company. Their designers will create a few posters that fit your needs, making you a professional poster that will help you reach your marketing goals.
Pro-Tip: Your printing company’s in-house design options are likely going to be cheaper than hiring other professional designers. Using their designers also guarantees that the artists working on your project are skilled professionals with proven experience in creating professional designs for promotional materials.
Poster Size
Poster printing comes in many different options, including size. The size and shape you choose for your poster can greatly affect your design options and best methods. Larger posters are perfect for conventions, meetings, and other events and allow you to fit more information on them. Smaller posters, on the other hand, are better for in-store/office use and often have fewer design elements to help avoid clutter.
Guide to Perfect Poster Printing
A great poster design is only half of the battle. After all, an amazing design won’t do much if it isn’t printed properly. Getting high-quality posters printed quickly is easy, but you do need to take the time and energy to make sure your file is ready and you have the right printer and printing options selected.
Poster File Formatting
Making sure your file is properly formatted is key to ensuring your posters print out properly. The wrong settings in your file can lead to discolored images, blurry text, and cut-off design elements. Taking the time to set up your file correctly will save you time and money on reprints down the line.
DPI
The dots per inch (DPI) of your file tells the printer how many dots (or pixels) to print per inch. The bigger your poster is, the higher your DPI setting should be to ensure a clear and precise print.
Many online images have their DPI set to 75. This is for two reasons. First, most images online are smaller in size overall, meaning there’s less need for more pixels per inch in general. Second, computer screens are much more adept at displaying images with lower DPI settings without compromising on quality. Physical printing machines, however, are not as efficient. To make sure your images come out clear and your text is fully legible, make sure your DPI is set to at least 300. But the bigger your poster is, the higher your DPI should be to ensure everything prints out perfectly.
Bleed and Margin
Even with advanced printing technologies and tools these days, there’s still a small margin of error that can occur during the printing process. Perfectly calibrated machines can still suffer minor issues that cause the paper or cutting equipment to shift while printing. When this occurs, a small portion of your poster can be cut off. If that portion contains important text or design elements, then your poster isn’t going to perform well.
Because of this possibility, it’s necessary to include a bleed and margin area in your design. This border around your main design elements should be free of any necessary images or text. It can be a basic color (including just a white background) or non-important design images that spread out to the edge of your poster. By including this safety measure, you ensure your poster prints out completely each time.
Pro Tip: The bleed area should be about 3 or 5 mm wide, depending on the printing company you’re using, the paper stock, and your poster size. When getting ready to send your file for printing, you can check with your printing company to ensure that the bleed area is correct and all important information is protected.
Color Spectrum
You’ve already taken the time to make your colors look fantastic on your design; now you need to make sure they’ll print out just as perfectly. Paying attention to your file’s color spectrum has nothing to do with the color scheme or palette you choose. Instead, it’s about how those colors are displayed.
Computer screens use the red, green, and blue (RGB) color spectrum to display images. Any color you can think of is created by filtering through those three main colors. However, printing machines use the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK) color spectrum to print images. Instead of filtering through RGB, physical printers mix and match four colors of ink to create the colors you see. Before sending your poster to the printer, make sure your color spectrum is set to CMYK and print a test page to make sure all colors look accurate.
Pro Tip: If you’re worried about making sure your file is properly formatted, you can contact your printing company for assistance. You can print a proof of your poster to ensure everything comes out perfectly. Using their in-house design options is the best way to guarantee that the file is perfectly formatted for their machines and printing processes.
Choosing the Best Poster Printing Company
Part of making sure you get the right posters printed and delivered safely is choosing the best poster printing company available. It may take a little time to research what’s best for you, but it’s worth it to ensure you get high-quality poster printing services. There are a few things you need to consider when choosing the right poster printing company.
Printer Location
Where your printer is physically located is highly important. Even though online shopping makes it easier than ever to order posters, you still want to pay attention to where you’re ordering them from. A poster printing company located in an urban area like downtown Los Angeles is going to be a better option than one located out in the middle of nowhere. A good location for a printing company ensures the following:
Speedy Shipping – The more centrally located a printing company is, the more shipping options they have and the less likely they are to suffer delays due to bad weather conditions.
Safer Delivery – With nothing but major roadways between you and your printing company, there’s less chance for your posters to get damaged during the delivery process.
Pro Tip: Choosing a poster printing company near you can allow you to pick up your order in person, ensuring the delivery is smooth and safe.
More Printing Options – The better shipping options a poster printing company has, the better ordering options they have as well. A printer located in a city or other urban area has greater access to a variety of paper stock and sizes, increasing their options for your poster printing needs.
Printing Services
It may seem like an obvious fact, but you can’t get posters printed by a printing company that doesn’t offer that service. Even if they agree to print posters especially for your business, you’re better off with a printing company that has the knowledge and experience in poster printing. Not only will they be more likely to create a high-quality product, but they’ll also have more printing options to help you create the perfect poster for your needs.
Low-Volume Printing
Ordering posters in bulk will help you save money, but sometimes you don’t always need 100 posters at a time. Many printing companies have a minimum number of posters you need to order. Finding a printing company that offers low-volume poster printing can help you get just the right number of posters without breaking the bank.
Poster Printing with Guru Printers
Getting high-quality posters printed is easy and affordable. At Guru Printers, we dedicate our business to helping your business grow. Located in downtown Los Angeles, we’re a leading poster printing company that can help you get quality posters printed quickly. With the help of our in-house designers, you can create professional and eye-catching posters. They will help boost your business and grow your promotional efforts. With both bulk and low-volume poster printing options available, we can help you with any poster printing project you have. For more information about our poster printing services, give us a call at (213) 320-4865. You can also send an email to [email protected].