College poster

Anima

Hi,

I'm doing a poster for my project in college. Its a digital signal generator. Basically my poster has to show how it operates/how someone would use it. It has to be A4 but the A4 in Photoshop is massive (8000 pixels wide!).

Its probably going to be blown up anyway but should I maybe bring the resolution down? I know nothing about printing images.

There is a prize for the best poster so any critique on how it looks? Colours, presentation etc.

Heres the resized version: Click!

Thanks

spidermonkey

maybe if you tidy up the layout, its very busy and theres a lot of distraction.
your poster is really a walkthrough of what your controller thing does so keep it linear, maybe use a different angle for the photo

heres some inspiration and if you also look at the apple store layout and the creative review blog layout

iconboy

For a poster like this I would set up the elements in Photoshop as needed and then assemble th eactual layout in Quark or Illustrator. This will keep your fiel sizes lower and also allow you to set and control the text better than PS.

For large prints (A2, A1) that are digitally printed I usually set up at 300ppi or 350ppi on an A4 (quarter size for A2) and that generally works ok as most digital printers scale up ok as they don't need as much resolution as litho printing.

You shoudl look at useinga better display font for the poster (Din, Dax, Interstate, Myriad - something with bit of personality) and look at the gaps between the box edges and your type.

The colours are a little dull.

sdssarah

I presume you don't do design? Because you haven't taken into consideration a hierarcy of information at all:

http://www.metatoggle.com/design_crs/words.html

All the text is the same size and weight and I'll be honest I wouldn't spend more than 5 seconds looking at this "poster". The colours are a bit dull, and think about maybe using white space as a design element, you don't have to fill every single section of the paper. Keep it simple, less is more etc.

Think about every element on the page, is everything necessary? Is there a reason for everything? Remember:

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Anima

Thanks guys

No I don't do design at all. The biggest problem I have is trying to imagine how big the text would be in "real life" when its printed out. Thats why its all big and squashed. I'll try and get that right first anyway.

Cheers Iconboy for the .psd you sent me as well.