Poster printing
Although you might think you know how to design great posters, printing them is another thing altogether. If you don’t design your posters with the printing side of things in mind, your poster printing job might turn into a disaster. There are many professional companies that specialise in printing posters, that can help you with the entire poster printing process. A poorly designed OR printed poster can actually denigrate your company’s branding: if people don’t react to your advertising, they will learn to ignore it! Make sure you research the best practices for printing posters before you start designing.
First things first, use vectors for the graphics. Printing posters becomes a lot less problematic if you use vector images instead of pixelated ones. This is because vector graphics are scalable, and do not suffer quality loss or distortion when enlarged to the actual poster printing size. All professional designers, and poster printing specialists, use vector graphics. Using vector graphics will ensure the best results when you finalise your poster printing.
Secondly, be sure to think about bleeds. A bleed is when you have objects running off the side of your document. You should always allow a minimum bleed of around 3mm for all poster printing jobs. This will ensure your image extends right to the edge of the paper, and also gives you a small margin of error to work with incase your file doesn’t match up completely right with the paper when it comes to the final poster printing stage.
Also, make sure you decide on your key advertising message before printing posters. Less is always more, and you don’t want to obscure your message by overcomplicating or overcrowding your design. Think about your font size and what typography will suit your message and your business, but also think about what will stand out from a distance. Negative space is also an important factor – no matter what type of text you feature, it will stand out better without other objects cluttering it. Before you go towards your final poster printing stage, you should print out a smaller scale draft and make sure it looks good from across the room.
Posters are an extremely effective method of promoting your company or brand, but they’re also more expensive than other smaller scale forms of advertising. For these reasons, it’s important that you get all the design logistics right before you invest in poster printing.
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Good advice about the planning aspect of poster printing. Something else to consider is the printing technology used in printing the poster. If you want something to last for a while (outdoor signage aside), consider using a pigment type ink.
Most entry level wide-format printers use an aqueous ink process. Simply put that is a liquid-water based ink that is absorbed into the print substrate. Pigment inks are completely different. Pigments are essentially microscopic particles that are suspended in a liquid solution. This micro-particles are shot out of the print head nozzles just like aqueous inks. But, pigments adhere to the surface of the paper rather than being absorbed.
The benefits of pigments include:
– minimal color fade
– a more scratch resistant surface
– some water resistant properties
In some cases water-based inks will work just fine. But, if you want to kick it up a notch, you can’t go wrong with a pigment system.