Design Quick-Fixes For Poster Printing

By: Chelsea Nicole

Trouble in your poster printing or design? Many designs for poster printing can still have lots of errors or mistakes even though they have already been set to go to the poster printer. If you don’t have time to recall or rehire your layout artist before poster printing does begin, you might be in trouble. Worry not though. Let me give you a few design quick fixes that should help you solve a few common poster printing mistakes. Let me start with the most common complaint, bad looking images.

• When an image looks bad – When you suddenly discover that your images still look a bit bad, dark or raw, it is very easy to fix it a bit so that it looks “printable” for color posters. A simple quick fix that you can try out is the adjustment of the brightness and contrast settings of your images. Brightness of course manages how bright the image is, and contrast is the intensity of the light and dark areas of the image.

So to fix your bad, dark or raw images, all you have to do is to load up your design into an image editor and adjust those values. Brightness and contrast settings can be adjusted by almost all image editors that you can have today. So it should be easy for you to do it. Just go to the image settings on your software and you can make your image a little bit brighter and more intense. Microsoft paint, OpenOffice.org Draw, Adobe Photoshop, Corel draw and many other image editors can do this. This should give you at least some improvement on your bad poster images.

• When the text looks boring and unfinished – Now, if your text just looks simple and raw, the simplest thing you can do is to add some simple effects into it. By just changing your text’s color or maybe making it “Bold” or “Italic” you can already make your text more interesting. More than that, you might also want to try adding advanced effects like shadows and dynamic colors. All of these effects should make your text pop out and become more alive, improving your color poster’s impact overall. Everyone can add these simple effects to poster text using any basic image editing software. Just explore your image editing application to see how it works.

• When the whole design is off or cluttered – If your problem is that your poster still looks cluttered or just pieced together badly, the simplest quick fix that you can do is to basically remove other design elements and just leave your main object or image. Color posters are very simple mediums really and they do not need a lot of decorations and enhancements to look good. A simple image with a simple background can often work well enough or even better than intricate designs. So just try to remove some of the extra elements that are cluttering your color poster design. By making the design simpler, you should have a better design that should work for poster printing.

• When the poster dimensions are off – If you notice that your poster dimensions are a bit off for printing, the best quick fix that you can do is to insert your poster design into a poster template. Many poster printing companies have free poster templates available for download in their website. By downloading those templates, you will get a good idea of the right dimensions and settings for a workable poster draft. Just insert your main design into the template to get an idea if your poster is larger, smaller or askew with the dimensions. Just match your design to the template and you should have already fixed your poster design for printing.

So those are the simple design quick fixes that you can try out for yourself. You don’t need real expertise to do these things, but they will make your color posters look better and function better as well. Hopefully this will help you a lot in your poster printing. Good Luck!