5 Things to Remember When Designing a Large Poster for Church

Large format printing is somewhat elusive to some churches and their designers. It can be an expensive task, both monetarily and in regards to time requirements. I’ve spent a good deal of time printing large formatted pieces, both through printing houses and in house, and both have their benefits. If you keep these things in mind, however, the lasting power of your poster will be stronger and you may get the most bang for your buck in the long run.

1. Make it as reusable as possible. Inevitably you will be spending money on this poster, whether it’s something you pay for and send away or a printer you purchase in house to use every week. With that in mind, plan on reusing your poster. If that means that after using it you can cut it in half and keep it up during a season of the year, then that’s a pretty worthwhile poster. Brainstorm on it.

2. Include a “next step”. If the poster is going to be worth anything, you want the viewer to have something to do after they finish absorbing your beautiful artwork. Give them a website, a phone number, or a thing to do somewhere on the poster. It will improve the effectiveness of your poster by leaps and bounds.

3. Don’t try your poster at 300 dpi(Dots Per Inch) unless you’re running on a beast. This one comes from experience: if you’re making something fairly large (anything more than a couple feet long is considered large, by most standards) then the quality you will get with 300 dpi(Dots Per Inch) may not be worth the strain it takes on your computer. In other words, if something is big enough to go on a wall and be viewed across the room, 300 dpi(Dots Per Inch) will barely look different from the same image at 72 dpi(Dots Per Inch). Keep your computer speed in mind when designing your large print work.

4. Whatever your poster says will be big. Put a lot of time into the planning, copywriting, and finalizing of your poster. Your words are going to be (depending on the exact size) very big. If in doubt, grab a second opinion.

5. Every poster will end up somewhere. This may be the most humorous tip, but there’s truth to it: if you don’t have a plan, all posters will end up in your office. As long as you don’t mind working amongst tubes, then you may not have a problem. But if organization is your thing, and you want to keep some posters around for a while (especially if they’re reusable) you may want to plan for a place to store used posters.

Bonus Tip: Something I’ve been considering a lot lately, and something which I think I could be very passionate about, is the idea of recyclable ministry resources, specifically printed materials. For example: let’s say my church is finishing up a message series on iGod (which we are) and leftover from the series are a bunch of series posters that could be reused by another church (which we have). Is there a place to send them? If you’re in a similar boat, check in with churches in your area (or elsewhere) and see if they would be interested. Odds are there are a lot of churches that would jump at the chance for discounted/free materials if they knew it was out there.

Any other ideas? What sort of principles do you live by when printing large scale? What advice do you have for other ministry leaders in the area of design here?

This is a guest post by Ryan Imel. In addition to running Aspiring Indie, Ryan also blogs and runs Theme Playground and Cool Church Websites.