The Balance of Art and Information

Posters can often seem like a delicate balancing act if you want to get the most you can out of them.

A postcard is so small the message has to be short and the image has to be small. A brochure is long enough that you can have a nice amount of text along with a lot of different images, and a brochure is designed to provide more information, so people open it with that knowledge.

Now let’s look at poster printing. Because they’re stationary on a wall they need to do something for people to have interest in looking at them. A boring poster is a waste of space if no one is actually looking over and reading what it has to say.

A custom poster is also large enough that it can provide more information than a postcard or flyer can, but to get that information across you need to have a person’s attention enough to get them to read.
 
What ends up happening?

You have companies who embrace the information side of their posters more than they do the image. Sure, you’ll get a lot of unique information when you read that poster, but it looks so bland no one is going to bother reading it, so what is really the point?

Then you have the reverse side of it. A company makes a really great poster visually, but it doesn’t really have anything to say. You spend a minute or so looking at the image without getting any worthwhile information from it. In this case the person walks away without knowledge of the company, which meant that poster failed as a means of marketing.

Balancing the two is what leads to the most value from your poster printing, but is a very hard thing to pull off.

One thing you can do is make sure that your message is simple and easy to understand. That way you don’t need to say a lot to get the basic details across. See if you can integrate your message into the eye-catching aspect of the poster. Create a great title or banner across the top of your poster that lets people know the general message and gets them interested in reading the rest.
 
Too often a company views posters as an easier advertisement to make, and so they don’t put the kind of attention they really need to into designing it. The best posters are the ones you can put up and leave there for months and they keep doing their job the whole time.

The only way you can get a poster like that is by finding the right balance between your message and your attention-grabber. Having too much of one or the other and you’ll find your poster failing to live up to expectations. Make your balancing act perfect.