Poster Critic Guide

When you produce a poster print, you should always try and critic it first before letting it loose to the public. You do not want to release something that is still unfinished and relatively ineffective. So always integrate the review of your print poster designs before you release your posters. There are several questions that you should ask yourself about your posters to achieve this. These will be your criteria for judging of sorts for your print poster.

The first question that you should ask is if there exists a dominant emotion in the poster? Most posters work with invoking reactions in people, and that means having a dominant emotion present in the design. It can be something violent like hate, anger, frustration, or it could be something calm and beautiful like love, serenity and hope. These kinds of emotions must appear in the designs and people should easily catch it as they first see the poster. This is what makes a poster effective and eye catching. If there are no emotions present in the poster, and it is just a bunch of text and pictures, then it is not really a poster at all, appearing more like a notice. So determine if a poster is a real poster and pass on the real poster designs to the printer.

The next question that you should ask should be: can the poster message be easily understood? While emotions play a part in the appeal of your poster, the end product of a poster (the message) should also be prominently there. The message of the poster itself should be easily understood and people from all walks of life should readily comprehend it and take it to heart. So while judging the poster, try to determine the length of time before you can truly understand what the poster is talking about. If it took around 1-5 minutes the poster should be okay and effective. If however comprehension happened around 10 minutes or more, then probably there is a problem with the content.

After that, you next ask yourself: Does the design work? Design conventions change as the years go by, and some layouts may be more effective than others. Themes can also have different effects on people, and it matters greatly to the impact of your poster if your theme is properly thought out or not. For example, you do not want to use an outdated poster design when you are promoting a youth event or gathering and you do not want a wild and youthful design for adults. Also, abstract and complex posters are only good for more highly educated audiences while simpler designs are best for mass consumption. So ask yourself if your poster design works for the intended audience and do something about it if it does not.

Next, you should consider the materials used when judging your posters. See if the paper quality, the color quality and other physical properties are good and apt for the poster design and purpose. For example, if you are placing your posters in higher end places, the quality of its materials should be fairly high. However, if the posters are for general audiences and locations then the materials should not be necessarily top notch. So judge the poster materials in terms of quality and its purpose as well. Anything that does not match should be changed.

As the final question, ask yourself about the overall impact that poster gave you. Did emotions suddenly well up in you? Were you bored? Did you become interested immediately? Or did the message take a while for you to comprehend. Basically what was the general feeling when you saw the posters? A negative or positive reaction from these questions should really help in judging the poster if it is good or bad, effective or not.

Well then. Those are the things that you should ask yourself and consider when printing posters. If you go through this process for each poster design, you will find that your whole poster printing process to be more effective, garnering you better results in poster printing.

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