We have been doing poster printing projects over the years and have had our share of budget problems when it comes to printing them. Custom poster printing is no joke. It took out a huge hunk of promotional budgets for our events, awareness campaigns and instructional seminars. Now, in these slow times, it has become prudent to cut costs whenever you can. For poster printing, we have discovered a few tricks to print posters at a relatively low cost without sacrificing quality and marketability. Just follow these tips and you'll still be able to show a beautiful color poster design to the public with some money still in your wallet.



Print at home

One of the easiest things we did was to produce the custom posters at home. If you have a relatively decent printer and simple design, all the investment you need is a full cartridge for your printer. Use your own camera to take a few good pictures for your project and scan other pertinent details like the projects logo, sponsors etc. We used the free image editing software in our camera to improve the pictures, and just passed it in to a simple office application for printing. We just bought some glossy printer friendly paper from the show and poof! We had budget posters.

Use smaller sizes

If however, unprofessional looking home posters is somewhat lacking for your taste, then it's time to trim down on the size of the poster that your poster printing company will print. The standard sizes for outdoor posters would be around 24x36 and 27x39. For indoor posters, a decent size would be 18x24. This gives the maximum exposure for a poster but at a high cost. If you are targeting your posters to be placed on indoor environments with lots of traffic the standard letter size 8.5x11 and the larger 11x17 sizes can suffice. This gives you more or less the same amount of exposure for your poster but at a lesser price. Of course being smaller, try to compensate for this by using eye-catching colors and designs.

Design your own poster

Another way we have found to cut the cost of printing posters is by design posters ourselves. Hiring a professional graphics designer from the poster printing company or by yourself will cost you. If you are good or have some knowledge about graphic design then you are lucky you can do it yourself. Even novices with only a healthy interest in image editing programs can produce a pretty decent poster design when given some time. If you are pretty weak at anything art related, you can try using a poster template from the printing company, or download a few free templates over the internet at little to no cost. Of course the creativity and originality of that work might be in question. If you can't design by your own and still want a creative poster design, then try hiring a graphic design student. Their rates are cheaper and would welcome the opportunity to add something to their portfolio and resume?.

Quality vs. Quantity

Lastly, if you really want to cut costs, you have to decide on what you want to focus on, quality or quantity. If you already have an idea for a few of places with high traffic to place your poster then just print a few high quality posters and place them there. If you have a significant amount of ground to cover to place your posters then opt to print a high number of lower quality posters. Bet on your superior poster design and the sheer quantity of posters to get your message through.

Those are what we learned from experience when printing posters. They are expensive to make, but with a few little tips like this, you can be in budget for your project with no worries. Poster printing is a wonderful tool for promotions so always try to allot some budget for it. With these tips you won't have to worry too much though.