How to design posters?

[paulbass]

Hi all i hope i'm in the right forum for this question! In my band its been left to me to design some posters/flyers to advertise our band when doing gigs as im the only one with a colour printer.
I havent a clue where to start! Do any of you know of any useful design sites or programs i can use for this purpose? Cheaper the better as i'm pretty useless and it would be a complete waste of money for me to spend on anything too complicated!
Thanks for reading, Paul

[ezbass]

You need someone who has an artistic eye for this sort of thing, or if that's not possible then design by band committee is probably the way to go (sounds horrid but generates ideas). You can't beat a good band logo and photo IMHO. Here's one of my band's

[IMG]http://i308.photobucket.com/albums/kk344/ezbass/66783d6757922dd4baef511ad2c90656_zpsc00a495e.jpg[/IMG]

[BigRedX]

Owning some design software and a colour printer does not automatically make you a designer, in the same way that simply owning a musical instrument does not automatically make you a musician. It's an art that needs to be learnt just like any other.

If none of your band has the required artistic talent, how about asking your friends to see if there is someone suitable among them? Failing that try the local college arts courses.

[Big_Stu]

[quote name='paulbass' timestamp='1364651522' post='2029232']
Hi all i hope i'm in the right forum for this question! In my band its been left to me to design some posters/flyers to advertise our band when doing gigs as im the only one with a colour printer.
I havent a clue where to start! Do any of you know of any useful design sites or programs i can use for this purpose? Cheaper the better as i'm pretty useless and it would be a complete waste of money for me to spend on anything too complicated!
Thanks for reading, Paul [/quote]

While I agree with everything BRX has said, since you've been dumped with the job here's my 2cents.

Firstly I wouldn't dream of using my own colour printer for such a job - you'll be using all your gig money on ink cartridges, cheapy refills or not.

Use it to proof check your design (in your place I would recommend making it no bigger than A3 & putting a blank white window on it somewhere - usually at the foot area). Save your file as a .pdf that any half-decent printer can use & get blanks made; so that you can overprint them with gig details in the blank window at your local Asda or copier centre for pennies as gigs require them.
NB. Make sure it's a digital printer - as traditional print could possibly mess up the copier that does the overprinting.

How to make .pdf artwork?

Do stuff cheap & you'll get limited results, but there is a free programme download called Avery that has templates for many things, including CD labels, covers etc. Once you get the hang of it you'll find your own way. You will also get bombarded with sales spam from Avery.
[i](NB. Last I heard Avery was free, & ditto it's ability to "Save As" a pdf - so check for either before.................)[/i]

Personally as an absolute minimum I would suggest you club together & buy a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements - PC World discounts it down from £70 every so often. Not only will you be able to do posters with it but you can also dick about with photos & text for effects. I'd be surprised if there aren't instr vids on Youtube for it.

There isn't a quick fix, it's why - as BRX said - folk spend a few years at uni/college & a fortune on kit & keeping it's programmes up to date as well as being on a constant learning curve. It also forewarns them about the NB situations I've noted & a whole load of other insider odds n' sods.

[Toddy]

All the above , however till you get all that sorted etc...find someone with Microsoft office products,, knock up a poster in "Powerpoint" put it on a flashdrive / SD Card or whatever,,, nip down to the local print shop,, depending on the quality of the paper and size, usually only 7 to 20p a copy and you can have something that does the job,,

[Musky]

It might be worth asking one of the mods to move this to Off Topic - it'll get far more attention there.

Gimp and /or Inkscape are probably worth getting hold of. They are both well featured design programmes for photo editing and vector graphics respectively - they're both free, but you may well find the learning curve steep if you've no experience whatsoever. The simplest answer might be to use MS Word or Paint to get you started. To be honest they are both pretty rubbish, but if you need something in a hurry they'll get you started.

As they others have said, the key to good design is learning the basic principles and hopefully having an eye for what looks good. Without that you'll never get great design, but you may come up with something that is good enough.

Good luck!

[Low End Bee]

It's worth doing well. My advice is find someone who can do you a favour for a drink and get your artwork printed at a proper printers. Making sure your artwork is at least 300dpi, in the right format, the text won't bleed over the borders, etc. is sometimes a headache if you don't know what you're doing. Printing on a home printer will look very non league too.

I've a graphics background and my guitarist has previous in photography so normally we manage to get some fairly nice looking artwork sorted.
We've built up a relationship with a fast and helpful printer. We budget about £30 per gig on printing half a dozen A3 posters and a couple of hundred flyers. Glossy and professional looking is half the battle. We've got quite a few gigs on the strength of showing venues our old artwork.

[brensabre79]

We have a poster design that has a blank area for venue to fill in date/time.

Many bands have terrible posters, the thing to remember is basically you need to:
1. grab attention
2. get across the key information as simply as possible (Who? What? Where? When?) - the where and when can be filled in.

If your band has a following then the bands name might be enough to grab attention, if not you will have to be more creative.
Here's ours, we bought the image of the girl rfom istockphoto.com for a couple of quid. The logo font was free. We grabbed attention with the scantilly clad blonde, and soon built up a following. Now people look out for her on the wall at places we play.

We print them A3 and send about 4 or 5 copies to each venue. By printing about 100 each time at a local KallKwik or whatever it works out cheaper and we only need to do it every 6 months.

[brensabre79]

Having said that, here's something you can knock together in Word in about 5 minutes, that will do the job!
Big Bold and clear...



Edit: Please note this isn't an actual thing that is happening!!

Edited April 5, 2013 by brensabre79

[Big_Stu]

[quote name='brensabre79' timestamp='1365155033' post='2035946']we bought the image of the girl rfom istockphoto.com for a couple of quid[/quote]

A very good, valid and important point!
You think Mr Hall is a tad tenacious with his copyright? He's a pussycat compared to how some image holders can be..... cross some of them & you'll be selling your gear to pay their invoice & they don't let go.

[L_Bass_Dog85]

I will design at a fair price. As a designer working for a printing company I know that what you plan to do is more expensive and time consuming than using a professional. Trust me! PM inbound anyhoo...

[bertbass]

I do our posters in Indesign. Not cheap but does an excellent job. I then save them as PDFs and e-mail them to the gigs, if possible, this saves on ink, paper and postage and there's more chance of the venue displaying them. If I have to print them out, along with the gig guides, I do it on the printer that the band paid for using the ink / toner and paper that the band pays for. The band wants posters and gig guides, I don't mind designing them, as I know how, but I'll be buggered if I'm going to provide the paper, printer and ink as well.

[brensabre79]

[quote name='L_Bass_Dog85' timestamp='1365163352' post='2036131']
I will design at a fair price. As a designer working for a printing company I know that what you plan to do is more expensive and time consuming than using a professional. Trust me! PM inbound anyhoo...
[/quote]
Yep, getting someone who knows how to do you a one-off is a good way to go
Just make sure its something you can use again and again (i.e. blank space for details) You don't wanna be paying a designer every time you have a gig!

I used to do flyers back in the day for Manchester club nights. I did find it amazing that some were not prepared to pay even £50 for a poster/flyer design when without it nobody would turn up! (this was in the days before the interweb) Yet they would happily charge 200+ people £10 to get in, pay DJs hundreds of pounds for a 45min set!!

[Kiwi]

Good poster design, and pretty much any form of visual communication, relies on an understanding of how we interpret information visually and what attracts our eyes first. Here are some basic principles (all of which can be broken by the experienced designer)

The western eye reads left to right and top to bottom. Its attracted to areas of high contrast first and easier to read things (bigger letters, outlines or whatever). The layout doesn't have to be symmetrical but its important to ensure that its balanced. I can help with how to acheive that if you get that far. The information usually needs to be presented in the form of a heirarchy so figure out what is most important to someone who has never seen the poster before.

One technique I use is to squint and see what I can still read. Another is to pin up the design and walk past it to see what I can make sense of first.

If I have a lot of space and few elements I sometimes use the golden square which is to divide the page into equal thirds, from top to bottom and from left to right, and locate the most important element so that its touching two perpendicular axes. The other elements can then be arranged around them in ever decreasing order of importance.

[Low End Bee]

Good points Kiwi. I always print out an A4 of any new design and blue tack it on the wall. I make sure all the relevant info and the basic design is legible 12 feet away. If you can't read the band name or make out the logo it's money down the drain.

Email flyers you can be more flexible with.

Don't get me started on fonts.....

[The Dark Lord]

I got some done last year but got the black colour wrong believe it or not - someone told me about it on here, but I forget what they said.

[Bloodaxe]

[quote name='The Dark Lord' timestamp='1365170728' post='2036298']I got some done last year but got the black colour wrong believe it or not - someone told me about it on here, but I forget what they said.[/quote]

It's odd, but 'black' doesn't look black, but grey. One of them Optional Illusions I guess.

If you select 'black' in Photoshop's pallette, what you actually get is C=91, M=79, Y=62, K=97 which is often called 'Rich Black' or sometimes 'Printers Black'. Illustrator just gives you K=100 as black which can cause appearance issues if there are large areas of it. The same thing happens with paint, but people look at you funny when you tell them that there are shades of black.

Another issue I've had to deal with is 'Black Ink Coverage'. That's something that seems to be an issue with 4-colour printing & your print company ought to tell you their maximum BIC % upfront so's you can adjust it out of your artwork.

P.