8 Principles for Creating UX Poster Deliverables
Posters–documents that exceed standard-sized paper — capture readers’ attention by being big. They are public documents, inviting comments and contributions from people who may not be directly involved with the project. Not every design project I work on entails creating a poster, but those that do have given me a chance to learn some things about making them. What I’ve learned is that making posters is like making any other document–most of the challenges are the same–but the scale and the purpose of a poster requires seeing these challenges in a new way.
1. Know your parameters
Like any other deliverable, a poster must serve a purpose. Just because you like using the large-format printer doesn’t mean you should. Before even sketching some ideas, write down the objective of the deliverable, characterize the audience and imagine what they want to get out of the poster.
Tips
- Think of your audience and ask yourself: Is this for a conference or a client?
- If for a client, what members of the team or what teams will be viewing it? Business stakeholders look at deliverables differently than designers and will be looking for different points of data.
- Not every objective needs to make it into the poster. Whittle them down by getting feedback from your peers or and the people who will use the poster.
Example
I could have saved myself a couple revisions on a recent project if I knew that the poster needed to work both in large format and incorporated into a regular document. My client wanted me to capture the structure of a site, comprising thousands of pages across dozens of different page types. It wasn’t until several versions in that we realized that the primary deliverable would benefit from the visualization to provide context for the rest of the document.
2. Treat poster design as a project
While most UX deliverables pace to the design process, serving as a reflection of the creative effort, posters tend to be outputs in and of themselves. Designers must consider this as they establish a process for creating the poster. The nature of the review sessions, the number of iterations, and the time required for production will all impact the overall timing and schedule.
Tips
- Put together a lightweight project schedule for your poster, complete with activities (sketching, researching, etc.), outputs, and milestones.
- Setup milestones on your calendar.
- Plan for group feedback. Unlike documents that can be reviewed by one person, posters need to be reviewed by many. Getting group feedback takes more time, so plan accordingly.
Example
When creating a poster for the 2010 IA Summit, I didn’t have my “Ah Ha!” moment until our monthly Share and Care. After my group feedback, I realized I was focusing on the wrong information. When soliciting feedback, I thought readers would be interested in cool statistics about Phoenix like crime, population density, etc., but the group told me they wanted something useful, more along the lines of, “What should I do?” and “Where should is go?”. It tuned out, that’s what everyone at the IA Summit wanted as well, and the poster was a hit!
3. Embrace the scale
Multi-page documents are big in number but small in page size, while posters are small in page number but large in page size. Posters can run as large as you’d like them to be, but the average is 4 feet in height by 6 feet in width. That’s a lot of real estate and in most cases takes a lot of resources on your computer to deal with the file: moving around in a document, placing huge high resolution images and exporting to a reasonable size. When you think about it though, this no more challenging than a large multi-page document of 100 pages. It’s a lot of real estate, but it’s spread over smaller chunks, and trying to manage a computers system resources with slowness and multiple linked files can be just as hard.
Tips
- Don’t think of a poster as something that has to be measured in feet, think of it as something that can be measured in inches.
- Keep your document size to 11×17 inches: smaller documents are easier to manage and can be scaled during production to achieve the desired size.
Example
When starting a new poster, I’ve always customized the 11×17 template in Eightshapes Unify to be 48×72 with added typographic styles. A document of this size leads to performance issues. While InDesign is a powerful tool, it can slow to a crawl when burdened with such a large document and lots of linked files. Nathan’s most recent poster (outlining component creation and management) was created as an 11×17 with the addition of smaller typographic styles. In the end, Nathan saved a lot of time due do the performance of InDesign being much faster.
4. Double your estimate for level of effort
Take all the revisions you would do across a multi-page document and compress that down into a single page. Then consider that adjustments on one page of a multi-page document don’t necessarily ripple across the rest of the document, while in a poster those ripple effects are more powerful. Making a small change on a poster impacts the entire visual.
Tips
- Start getting feedback from your earliest drafts.
- Sketch early and often.
- Place shapes on the page to represent layout before doing detailed design work.
- Use a shared tool such as Google Drawing to collaborate and house initial ideas.
Example
I designed a poster to show: a range of page types, the components being used with each page type, how components related to sections of the site, and launch dates and examples for each component and page type. In order to get ideas on how to show all this information, I had a sketching session at our monthly meeting with the rest of the EightShapes team. I gave them the criteria above and challenged them: “How would you design a poster to show all this information?” The results were fruitful: I came away with some fantastic ideas. Borrowing heavily from all the concepts, I designed a poster that was well-received by the client.
5. Cut content ruthlessly
Yes, you could probably take every idea you have and fit it on the poster. It would just be a boring poster. Make sure the ideas you keep feed the purpose and don’t distract from the story.
Tips
- Make a list of all the things you want to say on the poster and focus on the top three things.
- Show others your list and ask them what they’d like to hear about.
Example
For my 2010 IA Summit poster, I had a million ideas running through my head. To help focus, I shared my outline with the EightShapes team and they helped me zero-in on which data was most useful. I initially had two maps, one aerial view with data plotted on it, and another with pins for locations to visit. The aerial map overpowered the poster and took away from the purpose. The image found itself grayed out and in the header for visual appeal.
6. Stand back
If you’ve decided to do a poster, there’s a good chance you want it to convey information up close, but also capture your audience and convey a story from a far. Unlike a multi-page document where you pick it up and flip through it, this is something that people are going to approach and take in, then walk away from when they’re done.
Tips
- Sketch your layout before you touch a design tool.
- Think about those points you want to keep in and where they should go on the page.
- Think about your poster as a table of contents from afar, and the meat of your book is digested once they approach.
Example
When I created a poster for a specific client, I knew that it would be posted in a hallway. People were going to be walking by looking at it and I wanted it to make them stop and take in the information. It had to be simple and easy to understand the purpose, so readers walking by would get it in an instant. I used a set of colored mapping mechanisms to show what components, by category, fit into certain chunks of the pages. I divided the poster into regions, which clearly laid out the components used for each section of a page, with annotation for quarterly launches and specific visual examples. To this day, the poster is still displayed in the main conference room, as the project continues to roll-out new phases of components.
7. Make starting point(s) clear
Multi-page documents naturally tell a story because they progress page by page. With a single-page poster, it’s harder to conceive of the progression–where readers start and how they reach the story’s crescendo.
Tips
- Ask yourself, “where should my story start and where should it end?”
- Use visuals to keep your story on track. A document goes page to page using numbers as the metaphor for progression
- Explore other successful models for information, like board games. Look at games such as Monopoly or Candy Land. These are posters that communicate progression, too.
Example
With my poster for the 2010 IA Summit, I had a map in the center of the page showing places to visit, then columns of distance moving away from the map listing out restaurants and points of interest. In this case, the starting point wasn’t the top left corner, but the middle of the page.
8. Establish type styles at the outset
Multi-page documents rarely incorporate more than one or two typefaces and type sizes. Posters may need a deeper range of type styles to help communicate structure and progression to readers.
Tips
- Use a design tool that allows you to define styles. This allows for easy updating across your entire document.
- Pick fonts that are readable and have a nice design to them. Remember, this isn’t just something people are going to read, but it must capture attention.
- Your story should be told in small easy to digest chunks, not huge paragraphs of information that detract from visual story.
- In your initial sketches, define which chunks of text get a specific type style.
Example
In one of my first posters I didn’t define type styles. As I polished the poster, it was difficult to make sweeping updates to fine-tune the typography. Because I didn’t have defined type styles, as I updated fonts and font sizes, my layout started to break and I found myself then having to trim copy. (Luckily with my use of Twitter, I’ve learned to be more creative in smaller chunks of text.) Lesson learned: set your type styles early.
Posters are a labor of love. In some ways they are more challenging than composing a multi-page document, and for that you feel more rewarded in the end. If my examples aren’t enough to get you started, take a look at some of the sites and books I turn to for inspiration:
Originally published at www.eightshapes.com on October 26, 2010.
