7 Steps to Setup a Proper Poster Template
Poster templates are of course THE WAY to go when you need to print a lot of similar but slightly different designs for poster printing. It not only lets you build up designs faster, but it also standardizes your layouts for a more efficient process in poster printing.
Poster templates are of course THE WAY to go when you need to print a lot of similar but slightly different designs for poster printing. It not only lets you build up designs faster, but it also standardizes your layouts for a more efficient process in poster printing.
In this guide, I will teach you how to setup your own poster templates properly. This might get technical a bit if you are new at this, but we will try to make it as simple as possible. Let us get started!
1. Create your page — The first step in creating a proper poster template is to create your page. The precise steps will vary depending on the software you are using, but typically all you have to do is to find the “File menu” on your software application and click on the “new document” option. Some applications will immediately open a default document, while others will bring up a dialog window that will ask you to choose the page setup. Whatever the case though, you have already started creating your document, and you should now move on to setup its dimensions.
2. Setup its dimensions — Now, to setup your dimensions, make sure you are at the page settings dialog window, or page layout controls of your software. In most cases, you should see a length and width value already set as default. Change these values to the poster dimensions that you want. If you want a custom poster template, you should of course just decide the dimensions yourself. If however you want to use some standard sizes for easier printing, you might want to refer to a table of standard poster printing dimensions. For your reference, here are a few standard dimensions in use today:
3. Add your margins/guidelines — Next, after setting the dimensions, the next step is to add your margins and guidelines. These are all dependent on your design itself, but typically, I would set guidelines at the vertical and horizontal centres of the document so that I can balance poster design elements properly. Moreover, it is also important to set some margins on the sides of your color posters so that you can place a boundary to your design elements. You can easily place guidelines by activating the rulers of your desktop publishing application and then placing the appropriate guidelines on the specific measurements. This can vary from application to application.
4. Setup the printing bleed — Afterward, the next step is to setup the printing bleed. If you know that your backgrounds and other design elements needs to pass through beyond the margins to make sure nothing goes wrong in printing and cutting, you will indeed need a printing bleed.
To setup a printing bleed, all you need to do is to enlarge your poster dimensions by one quarter of an inch on all sides (top, bottom, left, right). You can do this by simply going back to the page settings or page layout controls and adding the extra dimensions into the length and width. Make sure though that you add the guidelines to mark the original edges of your documents so that you know the primary boundary of your posters.
5. Add the template background — Once all the main technical things are done, you should then just add the template background that you need. This can just be left blank of course if your template requires a blank background, however usually most people customize the background for more personal poster templates. Just try to determine if you need to do this or not.
6. Add placeholder design elements — If your custom template also needs some other design elements as a standard feature, you should of course add them after inserting the template background. Common examples of these placeholder elements include borders, additional textured background elements, logos and watermarks. Just insert them to the proper place in your poster template.
7. Save the document as a template — Once all of these are complete, the only thing that is left to do is to save the document as a poster template. Now in most cases, you would want to save this in your software application’s native format. Microsoft applications usually provide template formats for you to save in, while for Adobe and Corel software, saving your files as a normal document will be enough to turn your design into a template.
Great! There you have it! Just follow those steps and you should have a great poster template already set for you.
Resources:
Born and raised in a family of I.T. in Georgia. I move to California 10 years ago and employed in poster printing company. When not in the office, I write about tips or info about creating poster templates.
Processing your request, Please wait....
