How to Create Eye-Grabbing Posters [Infographic]

Venngage Infographics Templates

As an HR professional, you probably don’t have a whole lot of graphic design experience.

But with so much attention being given to the benefits of visual modes of communication, it’s worth it to try your hand at some design. After all, many companies don’t have an in-house graphic designer handy for quick projects like posters and handouts.

Say your team is planning a workplace event. You could seek out an external designer but that will be time consuming and costlier than if you were to just design the poster yourself. Even if you’re not a designer by vocation, you can still create beautiful poster designs.

All you need is an understanding of some basic principles of design and a bit of practice.

It also helps if you start with a template, especially if you’ve never designed anything before. There are plenty of sites offering poster templates.

Here are the four main things you need to keep in mind when designing a poster.

Create a hierarchy of information

Because the purpose of an event poster is to get the attention of passers-by and to inform them about an event, you don’t need a lot of text. Generally, all you need to include is:

Name of event.
Company or department title.
Short description of the event or a catchy tagline.
Date and time of the event.
Location of event.
If necessary, where they can find more information (like a website or social media page).

Grab readers’ attention with a beautiful design

There are a couple of easy hacks for creating a beautiful design that you can keep in your back pocket.

Make the title the focus of the poster. Use a bold, easy to read font, big sized enough to read from a few meters away.
Use one focal image. The image should be bright and not have too many small details that will be hard to see from far away.
Pick a color scheme that communicates the mood of the event.
Use borders to section information.
Leave ample negative space (space between design elements) so that your poster design isn’t cluttered.

Design specifically for print

If you’re designing your poster to pin it up on a wall, there are a couple of print-specific tips to keep in mind:

Use CMYK colors, since printers print in CMYK color palettes.
Design your poster for a standard A1-A5 printer paper, so it will be cheaper and easier to print.
Export your image in a high resolution; no less than 300 dpi.
Set crop marks to accommodate bleed (when your design touches the edge of the page).

Design specifically for email

There are less restrictions when designing to web.

The most important thing to consider is the size of the image. An image that is too big will be annoying to receive in, say, an email.When in doubt, an 1080 x 1080 dpi square is a safe size.

You also have the option of animating your poster! An easy way to animate your design is to create a series of images with different colored background and to turn the image series into a GIF.

This infographic walks you through the steps for creating a beautiful poster: