If you want to take a shot at designing your own poster without professional help, plenty of free online resources can help you along the way. This article will give you a few basic pointers about designing a poster, and will also give you some in-depth online resources to help you even further. It’s not hard to design a poster without a graphic designer, but it will take some work, time and patience to learn poster design basics.

The first step to designing a poster is to analyze your audience. Will you be giving a sales presentation with an already existing client or are you designing a poster for a trade show booth? In the latter case, you’ll need some eye-catching graphics as well as text that will draw people in who may not even know what your company does.

How will you know what content needs to be on the poster? Ask yourself the following:

• What specific terms, issues or concepts does my audience need to know?
• What kinds of graphics will best illustrate my points and help in my presentation?
• What questions can my poster answer without the audience having to ask?

Answering these questions will help you focus your content and will let you know what kind of graphics you need. These are the types of questions a graphic designer would ask you. For more questions and in-depth analysis, see the Cain Project’s poster design guide.

The flow of information on a poster can move from left to right horizontally or left to right vertically (meaning with multiple columns). You’ll also need to decide if your poster design will be portrait or landscape orientation. (Check out your word processer’s Page Layout feature if you aren’t sure what the difference is.) You can also break your information into boxes that flow diagonally across the poster or in the left-to-right layout. If you don’t have much info, the diagonal flow works well; otherwise you should use the left-to-right layout. The flow pictured here represents how people’s eyes naturally follow a four-column poster (the left-to-right vertical layout). See the Information Literacy site for more tips on layout.

To see what good poster design looks like, browse through the following Web sites. These will give you ideas and you can see what makes for an effective poster design.

• Print Create
• BJ2Design
• Nike Posters
• Graphic Fetish

Once you’ve gotten some inspiration, you can design a poster just like the pros, but without spending big pro bucks. Remember that your poster’s message must be clear to the audience—get the flow and the content down before adding any fancy graphics or photos.