Choosing the Best Type of Poster for Your Business

Posters bring graphics and text together in a way that catches people’s attention and communicates a message or gets them to take an action.

You might be familiar with famous political posters from World War I and World War II, or maybe you’ve collected your fair share of movie posters. Motivational posters and affirmation posters encourage students to be the best person they can and cover many classroom walls.

While posters have a wide variety of uses, businesses typically apply them in two ways. You might use a poster to promote your services, such as hanging them around town. Or you may hang posters in your office to communicate important information to workers or clients who visit.

Posters come in many styles. If you’re considering a poster for your business but aren’t sure which type will work best, we’ll explain what to consider and provide some examples that use different elements well.

• Things to consider when choosing a poster
• Choosing between different types of posters

Things to consider when choosing a poster

Before diving into our discussion of the different types of posters, let’s look at the characteristics that make a poster effective.

Well-defined goal

Before anything else, know your goal for the print promotion. Your goal will determine everything else you do with your poster, including your design and messaging.

For example, if your goal is to promote an upcoming event, you’ll need messaging that clearly articulates the event. If you’re interested in promoting a particular product, you might come up with design ideas that make the product stand out on the poster.

Attractive design

Your next priority should be design. You want to create a poster that accurately reflects your brand’s messaging and goals. A design that creates chaos, uses too many words, or otherwise makes it hard for people to digest the information you want to communicate won’t have your desired impact.

Focus on visual hierarchy. Visual hierarchy walks viewers through the material by telling them where to focus their eyes first, and keeps people from feeling overwhelmed. To create a visual hierarchy, you can use elements like:

• Size
• Color
• Texture
• Alignment
• Contrast

These features draw attention to particular parts of the poster, allowing you to guide the user experience.

Clear target

Similar to having a well-defined goal, you need to know your poster’s target audience. As with any advertising campaign, knowing who you want to reach with your messaging will guide your language, visuals, and even where you hang the poster.

If you want to create a research poster, for instance, your target audience might be other academic professionals. As a result, you’d probably include more text, charts, and graphs than if you were trying to reach a general audience.

Coherent color scheme

Colors can emphasize the most important parts of your poster and elicit certain emotions from your audience, like excitement. To use colors effectively, you’ll need to understand what different colors mean.

• Red can communicate energy, love, boldness, power, or danger. You see the desire to communicate these ideas in the Netflix logo.
• Orange communicates enthusiasm. It brings together the associations of red with the playfulness of yellow. Consider the young children’s channel Nickelodeon as an example.
• Yellow is associated with happiness, joy, playfulness, and spontaneity. Consider the example of the McDonald’s logo.
• Green gives subtle messages associated with growth, wealth, and nature. Consider the color in the Whole Foods logo as an example.
• Blue gives the message of intelligence and trust. Think of how you see it used by a variety of IT companies, like Intel.
• Purple helps create an atmosphere of mystery and luxury, dating back to the times of its association with royalty. Think of the British luxury brand Asprey.
• Pink offers a message of romance or tenderness and sweetness. You see this color pop up with brands like Baskin-Robbins.

Depending on how you want to trigger your audience, you can choose between different color combinations using a color wheel like Adobe Color.

• Analogous colors. Using a 12-color color wheel, choose any three colors that are side by side.
• Complementary colors. Using a 12-color color wheel, choose colors that are opposite each other on the wheel, such as red and green.
• Nature-inspired colors. Look to nature to observe the types of colors that balance each other well.

You might already have brand colors that you can incorporate into your poster for cohesive branding. If you haven’t chosen a color scheme for your business, learn more about how to do so and uncover your brand colors.

Complete information on the topic

As you design your poster, ensure that the language and design you choose communicate everything you want to say about the topic. The audience may lose interest or become confused if they don’t have enough information. If you want your target audience to take a certain action, your poster should make that obvious.

If you’re hosting an event, your poster should explain what that event is, when it’ll take place, and at what time. Will it cost anything or is it free? What is the dress code? You’ll also want to include any other pertinent information.

Getting help from a professional

Whether you’re interested in creating a print poster or a digital poster for social media, you should consider several things in the design. Working with an independent poster designer or graphic designer like those found on Upwork can help.

They can take your vision, brand colors, and the information you want to convey and use it to create a design that catches the eyes of your target audience. They can also help you determine the right typeface for legibility and poster size, depending on where you want to put the poster.

Choosing between different types of posters

Now that you know what makes a poster effective, let’s explore some popular types of posters with examples that might work well for your business.

Advertising poster

The purpose of an advertising poster has the straightforward goal of promoting the business—whether it’s a product, service, or the brand itself. This type of signage usually incorporates the company’s logo and provides the audience with any necessary information about what’s being offered.

But while the goal of an advertising poster is straightforward, it needs to spark emotion or elicit a certain action. You want to encourage people to respond in some way, even if that response comes in the form of associating your business with particular emotions. You might incorporate symbolism to do this.

Consider this advertising poster from Snickers. The most obvious thing a person might see is that someone is holding a hockey stick. The grip might be interpreted as being powerful or in anticipation of the next play, but the player may actually be experiencing signs of fatigue since the grip is loose.

A closer look reveals the glove is made from Snickers bars. The Snickers bar, this poster infers, gives the player the strength they need to keep playing. Snickers does it through a calorie-dense snack that gives players the energy to keep playing.

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Informational poster

An informational poster provides a quick explanation of the message’s main objective. These posters help educate the target audience.

With this poster style, the information presented tends to be very fact based and data heavy. You want viewers to walk away more informed. However, these posters don’t generally require the audience to have considerable background knowledge on the subject to appreciate or benefit from the poster. You might see this type of poster in public health campaigns.

To see the impact of informational posters, look at this example from the Government of South Australia. The post combines key visuals with short, valuable language to explain how people can protect themselves in the heat.

You don’t have to have any medical training to understand the poster, meaning that everyone will find value in it. Additionally, the pictures help capture people’s eyes and communicate the main ideas in the poster quickly, even to people just passing by.

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Event poster

An event poster focuses on providing specific information about an upcoming event. For example, it generally lists dates, the name of the event, and how much it costs.

These posters want to build excitement about an event, so the Call to Action (CTA) will typically center around encouraging people to learn more about the event by visiting a website or purchasing tickets to attend.

The poster’s design should align with the mood of the event. People scanning the poster should walk away with an idea of what to expect if they attend.

The event poster for this music festival uses a fascinating mixture of colors to capture the mood. The design along the top of the poster uses fluid motion, like dancing, while a plethora of colors catches the eye. Those who enjoy music festivals are sure to notice this particular poster.

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Subject poster

A subject poster focuses on the visual aspects of the design and works to convey information about, or elicit a response to, a particular subject. It might include a provocative message that encourages people to learn more about the information presented.

These styles can also be used with art and musical pieces, encouraging the audience to learn more about the art created and the messages contained. When these posters highlight art or musicals, they might be called show posters or cinematographic posters.

If you want to create effective concert posters, for example, you might create a design that highlights the type of response people have to the music—such as calming and formal for a local orchestra or energy pumping for a rock concert.

You can see this in this subject poster from Volkswagen. The car company designed these posters to get people thinking about car safety, particularly as it pertains to children. They tap into our instinct to protect children and work to associate their brand with safety.

In the poster, key information (the speed at which the children will hit the bottom of the stairs, the ground, or the pool deck) is compared to speeds seen driving in a car. It evokes an emotional response and gets people thinking about how to better protect those in the car with them.

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Educational poster

An educational poster focuses on educating the reader and providing key information. It often includes text overlay, using the content to convey key information about its topic.

This poster style is often used to highlight research work, so it can also be called a research poster. These might be used to help promote talks or speeches. With this poster style, the emphasis is less on the visual aspect of the poster and more on the information contained.

This educational poster discussing internet access provides a quality example of a research or educational poster. The strong use of visuals quickly captures the eye. Meanwhile, the authority moves the audience slowly across the poster, absorbing all the important information about the study.

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A professional designer for a professional poster

Posters can be an effective way to promote your business. Eye-catching designs can help build brand recognition and encourage people to learn more about what you have to offer.

If you’re interested in creating a poster that grabs the attention of your target audience, consider working with a freelance designer on Upwork. Project Catalog ™ makes it easy to choose from predefined projects and services that can help you create a well-designed poster.

Independent designers looking to help clients create high-quality posters can also find a home on Upwork. Browse the best freelance jobs currently available and take your design career to the next level.