Poster

Purpose

To provide you with experience designing larger display documents and working with larger plotter printers.

Task

To design and print a 42-inch-wide poster incorporating textual and graphical elements that communicate some crucial aspects of the ISU Solar Decathlon program. Background information and university team logos are available at:

http://honeyl.public.iastate.edu/442/downloads/solard/

while national competition and sponsor logos are available at:

http://www.solardecathlon.org/graphics.html

We'll discuss more details about the assignment duuring class on Thursday, March 6th. After you submit the assignments, I will print your posters on the English Department's Hewlett-Packard 800PS plotter printer in Ross 426.

Submitting Work

• A packaged InDesign document to include all images and fonts.
• An InDesign-generated PDF of your design.

Evaluation Criteria

• Orginal design ideas
• Novel use of typography
• Harmonious uses of color
• Excellent use of images (if any)

Two Ways to Design a Poster

Design in Standard Dimensions, Then Zoom Up When Printing

Just design your poster in either portrait or landscape setting, using standard 8.5" x 11" page dimensions. After you submit your poster design as both an InDesign package and PDF, I will send it to the poster printer using a 400% scale, which has provided fairly good results in the past.

Design in Larger Dimensions from the Start

Despite the handy trick above, most print houses recommend designing posters using the actual dimensions in which the poster will be printed. This method creates incredibly large files that take quite a long time to print.

I would not recommend this route, but if you ever have need for it, just download the zipped InDesign template below to start your design.

poster.zip

The dimensions of the template file are 42" x 54.35", which is the same ratio of an 8" x 11" sheet of paper. Margins in the template have been set at 6p on all four sides.

Images

Regardless of which method you use, photographs used in any poster file must be at least 300 dpi if not higher; it's best to use the "2 times rule" outlined in Rob Louden's Digital Imaging PDF. If designing a poster using the traditional method, the images would need to be even larger in size than those used for a standard size page. Using either method, your original images should be very high resolution to begin with.

If you are using the large dimension method, for example, and the target dimension of one of your final images would be 36" x 46", then an 8" x 10" original image would need to have a resolution of 1350 dpi, more than four times the resolution of a 300 dpi image. So any photos you want to use would have to be taken with a camera supporting mucho megapixels. The English Department has three Olympus Camedia cameras that you can check out for taking photos; just make sure you have it set to take photos at the camera's maximum resolution.

If you're using illustrations or vector images, however, you don't need to worry about resolution, as you can scale these to any dimension you want without having to worry about resolution.

Finally, nothing about this assignment absolutely requires that you use images. One could design a poster that uses incredibly cool use of color and typography to make an excellent visual point about the Technical Communication program. But if you decide to go this route, your work better be excellent.

If you have any questions at all during your design work, please let me know.