Design Tips

I’ve been printing street posters for 27 years. About 10,000 come off our presses every week, so I see where a design falls over long before it hits a wall.

Bold will hold.

There’s a saying among traditional tattooers, “bold will hold”, and I take the same principle to street posters. Bold imagery, great contrasting colours, and the thing looks amazing out on the streets. Design for social the same way if you like, but there’s one difference worth remembering: nobody drives past a phone. If it’s in someone’s hand, you can load it up with detail. On a wall, you can’t.

Who, where, when. That’s pretty much all you need.

The most common mistake designers make is putting too much information on a poster. The other one we see far too often is artwork built in RGB instead of CMYK. I put that down to the design apps that let you lay a poster out without ever learning how to set it up for print.

Street posters are for the streets.

The ones that survive those couple of seconds are the big, bold ones with great contrast, or the ones that get properly creative with their imagery. The design should reflect where it’s going. Even if you’re selling a brand or a product, think about the wall it’s going to live on.

I’d screen print everything if I could.

It gives a poster character and style, and you can spot one from a mile away. It makes you creative in a different way too. If you want to keep the cost down, you’ve got to build the whole thing out of two colours, which forces you to work out how to get everything you can from the ones you choose. It’s always interesting to see what people come up with.

That’s why so many people still collect the band posters from back in the day. The ink stands the test of time, and the designs were hand-drawn, big and bold, lots of halftones, two or three colours. I love it. I hope more people choose to screen print their street posters.

Ben Brown learned posters from the inside. He left school and took work in the art departments of screen printers around Brookvale, riding up from Manly in a pre-digital world where most of the job was bicentenary merchandise. The bromide cameras were the real draw, and he used them after hours to make rock posters and merch. He calls it his apprenticeship.

So he understood what the process could physically do before he had a style. The style came out of the constraint rather than being imposed on it, and it stuck. He puts his line work down to growing up around screen printing and a long love of thick black lines. He works digitally now and still makes the artwork look like it was printed twenty years ago.

The briefs have changed around him. Promoters used to ask him to tone the art down, on the grounds that a poster was about the band and not the artwork. He sums up where it landed:

“These days it’s about making a cool poster.”

His work includes tour posters for Nirvana, Mudhoney, Sonic Youth and Silverchair, as well as merch posters for Pearl Jam, Blink-182 and the Pixies. None of it carries an underlying message. There’s no code to crack in a zombified Elvis. The image does one job; it does it loudly, and it does it in the two seconds you have.

One idea drawn with conviction beats three ideas negotiated into a compromise.

See more of Ben’s work at benbrown.com.au

There’s a great Winston Churchill quote:  “If I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter”. Because being concise is hard. It takes time. And effort. This especially applies to great posters. Because it’s easy to put everything in we’ve been asked to – then make it all look nice – headline, a paragraph of copy explaining the headline, an image, some logos, and another one just because – and then make them bigger.

But it takes more time to pull everything apart, and out, and simplify, simplify simplify – and think long and hard about the best and most simple way to say the ONE thing we’re trying to tell people here, in a few seconds of their time, in an as impactful way as possible, leaving them in no doubt what we’re asking them to do.Like this genius example.

It almost makes me want to fight for the US. And hate them.

Versus the second – which doesn’t make me want to kill people like the other one.

Now go Rock it ✌

Street posters have an energy about them. After all, they’re out there in the street. They’re literally down with the people. Transient and immediate. Of the moment. At best, they seem part of street culture itself.

So when we design street posters we want to go with that energy. They’re a chance to be bold, imaginative, sassy, maybe a bit rough around the edges.

I’m going to generalise here in the interest of creating some guidelines, but really, of course, there are no rules. Maybe, in this medium, the more you break them the better. I’m also going to limit this discussion to more of an advertising context where a commercial message is imparted rather than a movie or music-poster context.

Perhaps the most important aspect of street poster design – essentially visual communication meant to be read at a distance, maybe as you’re speeding past – is to create impact and communicate quickly.

How do we do that?

Well, a lot of impact comes from your idea itself but i’m going to assume you have a great idea – so let’s talk more about graphic design elements here.

Essentially, great poster design is usually about reductionism and contrast. 

You want to let something win. Is it a headline driven poster? Well, make the headline huge and the picture small (or non existent). A visual poster? Make the visual the whole poster. Any words can be small (though legible). 

Minimalism is your friend here. Keep taking out elements until the poster doesn’t work anymore to find out everything you don’t need. My ideal poster would be a picture and a logo. Or maybe a picture where the logo was incorporated in the poster. Sometimes the logo can act as your headline.