25 tips to teach you how to design awesome posters

Poster design is full of countless possibilities. It does not have to stick to the rules, it can be as bold and creative as possible. There are also many types of posters, either with headlines for concerts or with text that contains a lot of information. Regardless of the type, the key is to find a balance between title, text, images, and logo. Now, we will share 25 tips with friends who love poster design to help students make wonderful posters.

01 The magic of color - conveying energy, expressing emotions, and eye-catching In design, color has unlimited possibilities. It can transfer energy, express emotions, and attract attention. Depending on the theme of the poster, you can choose bold, soft or romantic colors. In short, color can play a vital role.

In the example below, the Savannah Music Festival poster uses soft spring colors to let everyone feel that this is an outdoor music festival and the type of music you will enjoy is soft and beautiful, rather than heavy. rock.

Another way is to use solid color blocks, just make sure the various color combinations are harmonious. This approach can make the background stand out, as the example below illustrates.

You can also control the number of colors used. See how the event poster below uses only red and black to create an eye-catching effect with strong contrast.

02 Try different fonts Sometimes, just using fonts can make event posters convey rich information. Express seriousness with sans-serif bold, elegance with serif italics, or choose playful handwriting for fun. When choosing fonts, choose at least two—one for titles and another for text. Let fonts create visual impact. Take a look at the two beautiful event posters below, which are inspired by the event theme "food". This is a good example of how to use experimental composition to successfully convey the core content of the event to the public.

If you also want to try similar font styles, make sure to use a simple auxiliary font.

Below is a poster for the annual font design festival, which also cleverly combines the event theme with fonts.

03 Divide visual levels

Posters should be easy to read quickly and play an eye-catching role. It is particularly important to divide information levels. If there is only a small amount of text in the poster, use bold fonts as much as possible and combine it with simple graphics or photos. You can refer to ColumbusCreative’s poster below. If your poster contains a lot of text, make the text the focal point, consider placing a large headline, and treat the large amount of text as a whole text block.

04 Use negative space to form a clever composition

It is really magical to hide another picture in one picture. When you finally see the hidden image, you will feel refreshing. . The Melbourne Restaurant Association poster cleverly uses the negative space in the fork to incorporate wine glasses. Another way to use negative space is to focus the visual center on a smaller object and leave visual breathing space around it. Place text within negative space to draw the eye, but never fill it up.

05 Remove redundant elements, less is more

Sometimes, less is more. This method can attract the attention of the audience. A simple word or a dramatic picture can communicate far more effectively than a large piece of text or a complex image. Don't add unnecessary graphics or text just for the sake of adding it.

We can notice the most similarities between these two posters. They both use only one leading word to focus the audience's attention, and use plain colors to create a simple font feel.

The elegance of minimalism is still very effective in practical applications.

06 Lock focus

Combined with clear or blurred pictures, you can enhance the power of text. If you crop the image to its core, you can create a dramatic effect and draw the eye. The poster for the Chaillot National Theater below uses a partial lip image instead of a full face image to create a sense of passion and provocation. Have you noticed that the lip shape also outlines the heart shape?

07 graphics create visual highlights

Various shapes are connected to each other and then form new shapes. They can Create a visual clue for your audience. We can use graphics to place text, create interesting compositions, or guide specific visual directions. In short, shapes are extremely versatile and practical in poster design.

08 Various Possibilities of Composition

When all the information, pictures or graphics are ready, it is time to consider how to completely break them up and then reassemble them for ease of reading. . The process of reassembling information is like walking a maze. You decide how the audience should read the poster and obtain the information it expresses. Think more about the interplay between graphics and text.

The poster below was designed by Calamargraphic for the Malaga Festival. The text information is placed on the upper right side of the poster, and various colorful character graphics are used to lead to the text information.

09 Draw the depth of the picture layer by layer. Place graphics, colors and text on different levels to create depth, using a small drawing board to lead people into the small world of the poster. The Gardening Festival poster below is layered, using text and pictures to overlap each other to create a picture of the life of a gardener.

The Valentine's Day poster below has a similar approach, using shadows to create a three-dimensional effect. The placement of the text is also very interesting. They are close to each figure, making the two related to each other. Wonderful. The application of oblique composition in poster design

As for the application of oblique composition in design, everyone knows that oblique composition can make the picture appear more creative and break the horizontal and vertical visual thinking. , is a very effective design technique. Of course, any method cannot be used indiscriminately. The appropriate design direction must be chosen based on the characteristics of the picture itself. Among flat posters, there is a type of pure text design. To make the picture full of text less plain, designers have adopted this tilted composition method. The following set of posters use the contrast of the size of the text and The personalization of the composition achieves strong visual appeal and demonstrates creative design skills. It can be seen that in the above set of posters, the oblique composition is used appropriately. It is not just a pure flat effect, but some also add a stepped sense of space to make the picture appear more deep and purely text-like. Posters pursue freedom and artistry, and dare to break through traditional design ideas in layout, thereby showing more possibilities of design.

Not only posters with pure text, but also any form of design can use tilted composition under appropriate circumstances to achieve better results. In advertising design, tilted composition can reflect a sense of movement and impact. Power is a common advertising design technique. The poster of the 2019 Beijing International Film Festival also adopts an oblique composition. The projector illuminates a sky from below to obliquely above, and people's eyes are easily attracted to it. This poster, which combines text and characters, uses a tilted composition to cleverly solve the problem of too many texts. The picture conveys a clear message to the audience through the vertical layout of text and characters. Another area of ??performance of tilted composition is the design of film and television drama posters. More and more posters are beginning to adopt this design method in order to achieve better creativity. The most direct visual experience of using tilted composition in film and television posters is speed. The poster design of the movie "Fast and Furious 8" intuitively reflects this. Also reflecting this rough visual impact is the poster design of "Mad Max". Both of them directly reflect the movie style of action scenes. The poster design also highlights this feature, which is more likely to attract the audience. desire to watch. Thrilling and a sense of crisis are also characteristics that can easily be expressed by tilted compositions. The poster design of "Spider-Man" shows this, using a tilted composition to show the thrill and crisis of the movie. The movie poster design of "The Battle of England" also uses this technique, which reflects the power and tension of confrontation. Although the plot of the movie is not excellent, the poster is still very good. There are many movie posters like this, such as "Terror Cruise" mentioned in the previous article, which also belongs to this type of technique, as well as "The Winning Blow", "Fatal Showdown", "Divergent", "Ace" and " Movie posters such as "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles", "Doctor Strange", "Star Trek", "Dunkirk", "The Sweeney", "The Magnificent Seven", etc. also use this form of expression, so we can actually see that the action Fantasy and science fiction movies often use this technique to design posters. Poster for the movie "The Blast" Poster for the movie "Divergent" Poster for the movie "Doctor Strange" Poster for the movie "The Showdown" Poster for the movie "The Magnificent Seven" Poster for the movie "Dunkirk" Poster for the movie "12" "Ocean's" poster, movie "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" poster, movie "Spider-Man" poster, movie "Deadpool 2" poster, movie "Shadow" poster, movie "Ant-Man 2" poster, and like the above "How I Spent My Summer Vacation", The text is designed like a wall using a tilted composition, and a strong sense of space emerges. The poster of "The Beauty Trap" uses the perspective relationship of the characters to create a sense of tilt. The ballet-themed cover of Washington Life Magazine uses an oblique composition technique to make the picture appear dynamic and dramatic, which is very suitable for the expression of the theme. Summary at the end of the article: Oblique composition is a form of plane composition that breaks through the rules of traditional typesetting and uses a freer and more personalized vision to express information and emotions, which is also part of the diversification of design. In addition to the expression of creative points, using this technique requires more attention to the control of the overall structure of the picture. It is necessary to constantly adjust various angles and compositions to achieve satisfactory results. The combination and interaction of characters, scenes and copywriting are all important. It has very high requirements and carries the dual experience of the audience's sight and psychology. In daily design, we designers might as well practice it and have a general understanding of this method. Many times we just look at it to see how simple it is, but never do it. You can only do it if you do it. You will find that it is not that simple. A picture is never just a pile of materials. There are many ideological and structural supports in it, just like the human skeleton. Without this support, the picture will not come alive.

How to design a pop poster?

Layout design of POP posters

Layout design is composition, which refers to conveying product information to people clearly and quickly in a short period of time, thereby achieving the purpose of profitability. The content expressed in the poster needs to be processed through virtuality, proportion, and tone to achieve the publicity effect. The most important part of a beautifully made poster is the layout design, which means to make the advertising content reasonably and vividly within a certain specification and size, and lay it out reasonably to attract consumers' attention, so as to achieve better sales purposes.

Layout design is to properly arrange the relationship between the priority and color of the content. In the composition, visual rules should be fully used to highlight the key points, so that the poster has a sense of direction and order, and guides consumers on what to look at first, what to look at next, and what the key points are. Also pay attention to the white space in the poster, the general ratio is 3:7 or 4:6. Composition is also a kind of segmentation to achieve the ideal layout effect. The division of the picture mainly relies on lines or planes. An excellent poster is mainly reflected in the coordination and change of each part after the picture is divided. Usually, the layout of posters is divided into horizontal segmentation, vertical segmentation, vertical and horizontal cross segmentation, variability segmentation and other methods.

When people look at a certain visual point, their eyes will quickly focus on this point and stay still. The layout of posters should scientifically use the principles of poster composition to emphasize and attract, contrast and blank, balance and change, movement and rhythm. The content of the poster mainly includes: title, text, illustrations, borders, etc. Its production steps are usually three steps: typesetting - drawing - coloring.

The title word in a POP work is a very important visual communication, so the most important title word in a work must be outlined. Usually poster POP fonts include living fonts, traditional fonts, soft fonts, fat fonts, hollow fonts, etc. In order to highlight the theme, the fonts can be artistically designed, such as adding borders, tonal contrast, deformation, etc., to highlight the benefits of a certain product. When pricing, you can strongly contrast the size and color of the original price with the current price to attract consumers.