1ClickPrint News

Traditional marketing tactics remain a critical part of any strategy and are a highly effective form of communication stretching across any industry.  Whether you are promoting a new product or service, an event or even a serious message, posters are the perfect way to grab attention and communicate your message.

Posters are an inexpensive and highly effective marketing technique, which can be designed within you own company using a variety of software packages.  To help you design something that will do exactly what you need it to do, we have put together a few top tips to incorporate into your design.

# 1  Consider your choice of fonts
With an array of funky, traditional, and impacting fonts available free of charge, not every font type is suitable for your design as fonts are used to generate a feeling as well as communicate a message. If your poster is delivering a serious message, maybe something to do with Health & Safety, or raising awareness of a serious illness, then you should use a more formal and impacting, less elaborate and easily legible font style. If however your poster is about a concert, pantomime or other festive event then the use of more fancy, fun and festive fonts are more suitable.

# 2  Choose your colours wisely
Consider colours that work well together and avoid the ones that clash.   Clashing colours can be quite offensive to the eye and put your audience off as well as negatively impacting the entire design.   A colour palate of complimenting tones can generate more interest, increasing the impact of your design, whilst allowing the text and image to be digested with greater ease.

# 3  Images speak a thousand words
A well selected and relevant image can communicate so much, and with a poster you should ensure the amount of words you use is limited.  Using strong and impacting imagery can maximize the effectiveness of your poster. A strong, appropriate image can stand alone reducing the need for words to explain the message you communicating.

# 4  Less is more
Balancing the amount of empty space  on your poster is not just blank wasted space as some people my think.  Just because you are working on a limited size canvas doesn’t mean you need to make the most of it by filling every last inch with text or images.  By balancing ‘white space’ with other visual elements, you keep your poster clean, clear, and uncluttered, therefore focussing the attention of your reader on the important information on your poster.

1ClickPrint offer quality poster printing in a variety of standard sizes and lengths of print run, as well as being able to accommodate printing just a few copies of bespoke sizes.  Click on the Poster printing button for more information and promotions.

As part of your marketing mix you will be looking at opportunities for promoting your products, services or an event you are hosting or attending, and creating large scale posters and banners are a great way to get this message across.

These types of materials are often mostly used by the retail or events industries, but more and more companies are coming to us for assistance designing and printing large format graphics for posters, canvases and mounted boards for use at exhibitions, trade shows and public consultation events.  As long as you have permission to display something, then investing in the creation of professionally printed banners and posters will grab people’s attention and generate more interest in whatever it is that you are offering.

Of course, the design of your poster or banner is imperative to how well it is received and what interest it can generate.  To get maximum impact you should consider the implementation of the following points:

1. Decide which printed format best suits your needs, are you displaying internally with a short shelf life, or externally for a longer duration?  This will impact both the format your elect to use and also the material you choose to print onto.
2. What is your key message?  What exactly are you trying to achieve from this campaign.
3. Choose appropriate fonts, for example if your message is formal, don’t use Comic Sans.  If you are placing text on a background image then make sure you use a Bold, chunky font with the use of a contrasting stroke (outline) if required.
4. Do not exceed 2 font types, differing fonts can create impact and identify key points in your design, but too many different fonts can create chaos and ruin the appearance.
5. Keep the amount of text you use as brief as possible.  Remember that in most cases people needs to read and digest your message as they walk by.
6. Proof reading is key, not just to check for spelling mistakes, but also for readability.
7. Where possible always create your artwork at 100%, and have in mind whether you are having the artwork printed digitally or litho as this will impact whether your artwork and all its components should be set to CMYK or RGB.
8. Always use high resolution images, a minimum of 300dpi is required for clean, non-pixellated print production.

Standard sizes such as A0, A1 and A2 are going to be cheaper to produce, but we can print onto any size you require for the space you need to fill.  A customised size is available price on request, so give us a call for a quotation, having on hand the exact sizes you require, the type of finish and the material/paper type required.

If designed and printed correctly, posters can be a fantastic way to grab attention and promote your event and as summer approaches, so does the festival season!

Many music festivals, village fetes, craft fayres and farmers markets are underway, with many more planned across the country in the coming months.  So if you are involved in any of these activities and want to promote your event with a poster campaign, then get in touch.

We are running special promotions on bundles of 10 posters at A2 for a great price of £45 or 100 at A3 for just £55, with fantastic prices on larger prints and quantities.  Our larger formats (A1 and A0) are all UV resistant and won’t fade with sun exposure.

Click on Poster Printing to see our latest offers and details of how to order.

When supplying your own print ready artwork, there are a number of things to consider ensuring hassle free, quality poster printing of your design.  Of course, a qualified graphic designer will be well aware of all of these points, but for the less specialist designer the tips below should be helpful.

• Your print ready file must be a high resolution PDF (300dpi at true size) with trim marks and a minimum of 3mm bleed.
• All effects and images must be flattened or embedded.
• All fonts must be converted to curved or outlines.

These rules apply for all types of Posters, Banners, Flyers, Leaflets and Brochures.

The industry standard software for pre-press and design is the Adobe Creative Suite, including Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop. If you don’t have the necessary software and experience in creating press ready artwork, we can assist you you’re your artwork creation in-house.

 
Photos/Images
All images and photos must be a minimum of 300dpi at True Size. When supplying photos and images for printing, please make sure they are high enough resolution at the relevant size. Printing from low-resolution files will produce a blurry, pixelated image.

Any photo that has been saved or copied from the internet or a website is low resolution (only 72dpi) and in most cases will infringe copyright of the originator/owner. Photos and images for print should ideally be supplied as high resolution TIF, PDF or EPS files.

File Type
Certain file types are much more useable than others. For example JPG files are not much use at all, because the have a white back ground which cant be moved to the back of an image. PDF and EPS files are the most useful, though for different reasons.

A vector EPS file will hold all the working information of the file, and has the ability to enlarge without pixelating or loosing resolution.

A print ready PDF is a flattened file which will view the same on any computer. For example files can’t be changed or become corrupt.

Despite the advances in online marketing techniques, traditional marketing still has a crucial role to play in promote products, services, events, and ideas.  When designed a executed correctly, posters can be a perfect way of advertising your offers and services.

Posters can be designed and produced for very little expense using a variety of software packages, but to creative something ‘fit for purpose’ you must be conscious of the basic principles for making a highly effective design. Below are some tips to be able to create posters that appeal to your target market’s senses and attract them to your business.

1. Select the best font style
   There are plenty of cool, elaborate, and beautiful free of charge type fonts from which to choose. Nevertheless, not all font types are best for every design. If your poster is meant to deliver information, then work with a clean, simple, and easily readable font style. If your poster is about a concert that includes classic singers or a ballet performance, then spidery, stylish fonts will be suitable.
2. Complementary colour palatte
   Avoid using colours that clash. Not only do they appear unpleasant and irritating to your audience, they also negatively affect the whole design. On the other hand, colours that complement well together increase your design and enable the text and pictures to stand out.
3. Use strong, impacting imagery
   An image is worth a thousand words, so use this philosophy to maximize the effectiveness of your poster. The right images can stand alone without the need of a huge amount of text to explain the material you are hoping to share. If your design has a lot of text, choose a graphic that complements the written message.
4. Balance white space
   White space is simply blank space, which can work to your advantage. By balancing white space with other visual elements, you keep your poster clean, clear, and uncluttered. This allows your audience to focus their attention on the important information on your poster.
5. Work with a reputable poster provider
   Irrespective of how beautiful your design is, it can’t communicate correctly if the actual poster isn’t printed on quality paper stock, with quality inks and professionally finished.  Don’t think about settling on poster printing using your home printer. Contracting a respected printer is the sole method to get vibrant, attractive, and effective poster prints.

Good quality, striking posters can help achieve results for all businesses, especially when used in conjunction with other advertising and promotional campaigns.  A well designed and positioned poster can be one of the most powerful tools in any campaign, performing a number of different but equally important roles.

The role of a poster is to inform the target market of all the relevant details of any campaign, therefore delivering the message in a clear and precise way is important and there are a number of ways in which this can be done. By utilising colours, graphics, photographs and text, your audience will be able to understand and digest the key elements giving them the incentive to act, which is where professional poster printing really comes into its own.

Of course posters are not just for commercial use.  Many people have posters printed for their bedrooms and offices, having family photographs or personal images shot on their holidays, enlarged and printed at any size required, obviously dependant on the quality of the image submitted.  Poster printing can be used for work planners, maps, public consultations and much much more.

You can choose from litho or digitally printed posters, this generally depends on the size of the print run.  You can elect to have it printed on different paper stocks and weights, laminated in gloss or matt finish and at any size you wish (artwork resolutions restriction applies to sizes upwards of A3).

Poster printing has been one of our core products here at 1ClickPrint for longer than we care to remember. We have specialised in bringing high quality posters to our customers as the lowest possible prices.

Our continued success has allowed us to make a significant investment in new machinery and we are now able to offer UV stable, water resistant solvent prints  on to a wide range of papers, plastics, label media, vehicle signs, decals, window signs, lightbox film, floor signage, wall paper, etc.

All of these prints can be cut to any possible shape automatically during the printing process.

Our new equipment allows us to offer printing up to 54″ wide and 5 metres long. This does increase our product range significantly and the first new product to hit our site is the 1200mm x 1800mm poster. This huge poster printing is available on both matt and gloss paper and, as usual, our prices are the lowest around.

Our new equipment is in addition to our existing bank of Canon IPF printers so don’t worry if you’re specific needs require the 12 colour brilliance that they produce as standard.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or if you would like prices on any products mentioned above.