How to design posters

Posters can be roughly divided into commercial posters, cultural posters, movie posters and public welfare posters according to their different applications. Here, I will give a general introduction to them.

1. Commercial posters:

Commercial posters refer to commercial advertising posters that promote goods or commercial services. The design of commercial posters should properly match the product style and audience.

2. Cultural posters:

Cultural posters refer to propaganda posters for various social and cultural activities and exhibitions. There are many kinds of exhibitions, and different exhibitions have their own characteristics. Designers need to know the contents of exhibitions and activities in order to express their contents and styles in an appropriate way.

3. Movie poster:

Computer poster is a branch of poster. Movie poster mainly plays the role of attracting audience's attention and stimulating movie box office income, which is somewhat similar to drama poster and cultural poster.

4. Public posters:

Social posters are ideological. This kind of poster has a specific educational significance to the public, and its poster themes include various social welfare and moral propaganda, or political and ideological propaganda, promoting the spirit of love and dedication, * * * and progress, etc. Poster design: In-store posters are usually used in business storefronts for in-store decoration and publicity. The design of in-store posters needs to take into account the overall style, color and business content of the store, and strive to blend in with the environment.

investment poster design: investment posters usually aim at commercial publicity, and use eye-catching visual effects to promote a certain commodity or service. The design of investment promotion poster should be clear about its business theme, and at the same time, attention should be paid to highlighting the key points in the application of copywriting, which should not be too fancy.

exhibition poster design: exhibition posters are mainly used to publicize exhibitions, and are often distributed in streets, theaters, exhibitions, business districts, stations, docks, parks and other public places. It has the function of spreading information, involving a wide range of content, rich artistic expression and strong farsightedness effect.

Steps of poster design

1. What is the purpose of this poster?

2. Who is the target audience?

3. How do they accept it?

4. How about posters of other products of the same industry?

5. What is the strategy of this poster?

6. what's creative?

7. How to express it?

8. how to combine with the product?

The specific elements of poster design

1. Sufficient visual impact can be achieved through images and colors

2. The content of poster expression is refined, and the main appeal points are grasped.

3. The content should not be too much

4. Generally, pictures are the mainstay, supplemented by copywriting

5. How to design posters with eye-catching theme fonts (1) < p But sometimes it is its too broad form of expression that makes us a little at a loss when we start. We will discuss how to design an attractive poster in two phases, and what principles and skills are there in the design. Original author: Piper Nelson. For every graphic designer, poster design is a challenge. As a poster in two-dimensional space, its uses are numerous, and its performance themes range from advertising and promotion to public service announcements. The designer's challenge is to make the designed poster attractive, and to spread specific information so as to finally inspire the viewers. When you wander the streets of the city, wait for the bus at the subway station and visit the museum, you can find posters everywhere. And those best poster designs always make us stop and stay, and the messages conveyed by the posters are clear and clear, and we are still thinking about them after leaving our heads. In this article, we will discuss some basic principles of creation, which can help you to design an impressive poster. You will learn how to create a work with unity, harmony and rhythm, so that it can attract the attention of passers-by in the street. The poster above in Figure 1 was designed by Moroni. In this poster, the author used coordination, repetition and other attractive creative skills to communicate effectively with the viewers, which is unforgettable. Poster design basis A long time ago, when human beings had something to announce to others, there was no sign that posters could have greater advantages than other propaganda media. But why do people always regard TV advertisements and billboards as the symbol of our company now? One of the answers is that a beautifully designed graphic work still has some power to attract us. Fig. 2 Posters are generally forbidden in many buildings in the city. After temporary walls are built, posters can be seen everywhere. Posters are a very economical form of expression-good publicity can be achieved with the least information. Sometimes the poster designer will be asked to reduce the text content and convert other words into visual elements. Sometimes, the whole poster only uses some unique font designs. Designers are often asked to organize a lot of trivial details to make them clear and easy to understand. Designers' choice of pictures when designing posters can be said to be the key to success or failure. The function of pictures is to simplify information-to avoid too complicated composition. Pictures usually show what the product is, who provides it or who wants to use it. Pictures can turn difficult words into short and clear messages, such as "providing housing loans to migrant workers who have no money to buy a house" and other words that sound a bit complicated. Figure 3. In the poster above, how can you make the names of dozens of performers and creators interesting for the audience, rather than burdensome? -Make these names into an attractive artistic plane! In this poster of Lincoln Center, the designer cleverly combined a picture with fonts, so that the viewers could read it unconsciously. A poster designer needs to have a strong grasp of typesetting. Because the text on the poster is always very concentrated (relative to packaging or magazines), the typesetting of the poster text is very important. According to an unwritten principle in design, the less elements you use in design, the more careful you should be in design. The words on the poster always convey some specific information, such as "U2 Concert on Friday 12th" or "The entrance is temporarily closed due to maintenance". The font style, text layout and the ratio between text and pictures chosen by designers will determine whether the information we want to convey can be easily read and remembered. Finally, it should be noted that a poster work itself must arouse the interest and attention of the audience. Even the simplest pictures and words will be confusing if they are not designed properly. How do you design an infectious poster, so that the viewers can have direct contact with the most important information? These things are all problems we encounter in our creation. So we will introduce some basic methods in this article. The principle of consistency We have to face the fact that designing posters, like designing any other graphic art, can easily lead to confusion. Photographer? What I photographed was not satisfactory. Copywriter? They can't finalize it until the last second. Marketing staff? They change their minds every two minutes. In the design process, designers must have a clear sequence of the whole process and implement it one by one. Poster design must be consistent from the beginning, including headline, selection of materials, photos and signs. If there is no unification, the posters will become confusing and difficult to read. All design elements must be combined into an organic whole in an appropriate way. How can we design a consistent work? Let's cite several principles: the principle of relevance should make the works consistent. The first principle is to adopt the principle of relevance, which can also be called grouping. Relevance is based on a natural principle: birds of a feather flock together. If we see all the components put together in an orderly way on a page, we will try to understand them. We always think that they are a group-we don't care whether these different parts are really similar or related. This is a bit like the principle of "implicated crime". Poster designers can realize this relevance principle in many ways. First of all, grouping people, objects and words can improve the communication effect of information. It can be imagined that many advertisements on billboards are composed of a photo of a consumer, a product picture and advertising words. For character types (children? Old man? Overworked parents The choice of) is inevitably associated with the product. If people's photos are handled well, it's like consumers saying "I always use Bleacho brand bleach", instead of a hard-tied advertising language. Second, all parts together can produce stronger impact than a loose structure alone. When several items are very similar (for example, several different watches are chained together), the eyes of the audience can naturally move from one watch to the other. These objects form a visual unit, which can give the audience a single message instead of an indirect message. If all the items in the poster are very similar, the composition of a group will make the poster more attractive to others. Other elements will be regarded as secondary by the audience. Figure 4 In this picture, notice how your eyes go from one ring to another. All the rings are regarded as a whole, which is also the focus of the whole picture. Repetition Principle Another way to make a work consistent is to repeat shapes, colors or some numerical values. When you see a design element in a plane and its different parts are used repeatedly, our eyes will naturally follow them. Sometimes even if they are not put together, our vision will still regard them as a whole. We subconsciously draw a line between them. The easiest way to apply repetition is to create a pattern in the background of the poster and then apply it repeatedly. These repeated patterns in the background will produce a very interesting visual and composition effect, and then connect the elements of the background and the foreground. Another way to apply repetition is to guide the viewer's eyes to an important message, logo or picture by repeating a line of elements. Repetitive elements can create a path to guide our sight and make the audience create a curiosity-what is the other end? This is actually a way of telling stories and attracting the audience to continue reading. The repeated caterpillar pattern in Figure 5 guides the audience's eyes to the sign INNU. After this sign, there are some repeated patterns of butterflies, indicating the difference between before and after you went to this beauty salon, and the idea is ingenious. People's vision has a very strong sense of repetition, and sometimes even when the objects in the picture are not repeated, we will regard them as repetition. For example, in a poster about nail polish, we can add a big drop of nail polish at the top of the poster. In another part of the work, the same pattern or color as this drop of nail polish will produce an effect corresponding to the drop of oil above. Inadvertently, our eyes have gone down. Figure 6 In the above figure, these dots use the elements in the logo, and we use them again in the figure-which creates consistency, attracts others' attention and strengthens the brand promotion. Repetition is also an effective strategy to persuade the audience to compare the posters of some products. For example, we may put a dozen pairs of shoes in an advertising poster, but each pair is different. The main message (shoes) is easy for the audience to feel, because this item is repeatedly used in the poster, and then the audience will take a closer look at the different styles of various shoes. Another popular design technique is to arrange all the identical things together, but one of them is different, so as to achieve the unexpected effect. For example, you can design 15 squares and arrange them in a square, of which 14 are blue and one is pink, and it contains the company logo. It is conceivable that this pink color block will be the focus of the audience. Of course, the principle of repetition can also have a consistent effect on designing a series of posters, whether they are put together or separated at the same time. For example, for a series of outdoor advertisements for a summer concert, repeating the main elements can produce a sense of strength. When you see one of them, you will think of the other. Repetition of position, color, size or image can strengthen recognition and make viewers pay attention to all the information you want to convey. The principle of continuity is there any other way to create consistent works? Continue! It is usually used with repetition, as you have seen in the above examples. When a designer designs in a continuous way, the objects in the work are grouped together to guide the audience to another location. This method is generally achieved by linear effect. When we see a line, our eyes instinctively follow it to see where the line will go. The poster above Figure 7 applies a continuous design method to guide our eyes to walk vertically along the letter U. The left and right sides are composed of U-shaped characters, and the whole effect is quite good. And if U is not so wide (for example, it is narrowed by half), then your attention will be focused on E and C in the word PEACE, because under these two letters are the two tops of U. This method can make the pictures in the poster guide the audience's eyes to the information or brand we want to convey. But if we don't use pictures, but graphics made of words, it is also a good choice. Add background color If the shapes, colors or appearances of the elements in your work are not the same, how can you make your work uniform? A simple solution is to put all these elements in a solid color area. This approach seems to evade the essence of the problem. Why do you have to put unrelated elements together? Generally speaking, we don't handle it this way. For most commercial posters, you need to make your poster convey the information you want to convey quickly, and we usually use related shapes or colors. Figure 8 In the poster above, "Red" is not only the title of the performance or a political theme, but also a color that can bring all the elements in the design together. Through composition, this poster can also produce related characteristics. For some artistic events or posters, the audience will take the time to understand the meaning of each part by themselves. However, some discordant elements can sometimes convey an interesting and experimental visual effect. Sometimes, an advertiser will require that all objects be combined in a surreal form, and putting all irrelevant elements in a large background color area can make the audience feel that they are related. The principle of coordination can make the layout of posters have strong visual effects, whether it is coordinated composition or uncoordinated composition. Because breaking the balance will create a tense atmosphere. For children, we know to keep them away from those potentially dangerous things such as leaning trees, rocks, furniture or ladders. So the unbalanced composition also makes us feel this way. Are we going to fall? Is something going to fall on us? When watching a work, we always imagine that there will be a vertical central axis and a symmetrical composition on both sides. Coordination is particularly important for design, because the poster always appears as a single individual, and there is nothing around it to make it have other visual support points (others, such as the design of magazine advertisements, the adjacent page or other surrounding elements can be used as a support point). Symmetrical association