Excited! 5: Let's make a poster!
Hi there. Want to learn how to make a poster? Like this? Or this? OF COURSE YOU DO.
⚡️Let’s Make A Poster!⚡️
- Start with an outline or a script.
Usually this stage is done in a Google Document. In the case of the Open Source Hardware Belongs In Your Museum poster (with collaborator Miriam), the GDoc was essentially a collaborative chat transcript, thinking aloud through the points we wanted to hit.
Soooooo we also made a Google Drawing, to map out the basic story and flow.
At this stage, the outline can be all over the place. It's okay! You'll mentally and manually edit it down by the time you finish the next step. - Lay it out and print guides.
I use a vector-drawing program (see step 6 below) to put together a rough layout for the poster based on the outline. Especially when freehand drawing titles in LARGE LETTERS, you don't want to bunch all of the letters together at one end or the other. Unevenly crowding together your illustrations can be a big concern when sketchnoting live, so the lines and text and boxes you use as guides are your best friend, helping keep everything well-distributed across the poster.
To comfortably squeeze in more detail, I recommend slicing it up into four pages so that you can print the guides at two times the final size.
Wait, wait, wait! you’re asking, How do you choose HOW to arrange the information on the page?
Here are some tips. - Draw the poster on paper.
(Yes, you read that correctly. Paper.)
Why not just draw it directly on screen? Granted, I haven’t yet tried the Apple Pencil, but I’m still so much faster handlettering with pen on paper than I am with any drawing tablet or iPad stylus. I use Pilot G2 0.5mm black gel pens, and try to keep the scale of the drawings to the printed guides. This practice ensures that line weight is consistent throughout the poster, which makes it look (slightly) more professional and less like a jarring mishmash of clip-art.
If you mess up a drawing, you can just redraw it in the margins, and cut-and-paste it digitally later, in the following steps. - Scan and clean up.
I’ll scan everything at 600–1200 dpi black-and-white on an ancient Canon CanoScan LiDE. Because the printed guides are so faint (and light blue), scanning in black and white ignores them, and only picks up the dark pen marks.
By clean up, I mean removing any obvious big speckles and separating out shapes in Photoshop. (For example, on the OSHW poster, I drew some additional guidelines with a magenta pen, but these lines were dark enough to scan as black, so I needed to erase them digitally.) - Vectorize with DragPotrace.
I discovered DragPotrace (a free drag-and-drop Mac app atop the powerful Potrace command-line utility) through illustrator Ray Frenden on Twitter. It traces black-and-white bitmap art into vector files, and does so ridiculously quickly and simply. Vectorizing your scanned artwork will keep it crisp no matter how big you print it or how much you zoom in on it.
I use the default settings on DragPotrace, but you can play around with it as you see fit. Drag a monochrome (black-and white) bitmap image onto it; wait impatiently for a second or three; save as SVG (scalable vector graphics). That’s it.
(Installation tips here.) - Reassemble in a vector graphics program.
Now that you’ve turned everything into shapes, you can move it around, group it, and edit it. I’m a huge fan of Sketch, and use it for evvvvverrrrything—yep, even step 2, above. (You can alternately use any other vector-friendly program, like Inkscape ((free)) or Adobe Illustrator.)
At this point, I import the new SVGs as layers above the original layout guide, and resize the newly-scanned-and-vectorized artwork to fit the guides...since it never seems to import at the same size. You'll want to use the numerical scale tool to resize here (with a little trial and error to figure out the right scale percentage), so that you can resize all of the imported vectors at the same ratio, to keep the line thicknesses consistent. - Final tweaks and polish.
In the process of assembling the artwork, I try to judiciously group it into layers, and name those layers something that makes sense. Even if there’s no one else who will ever see the .sketch file, it’s good layer hygiene. I’ll also tweak the colors of the vector shapes, (sometimes) manually kern my sloppy handwriting, and (sometimes) edit the vector points by hand to separate out letters that were too close together. - Export a PDF.
This part is self explanatory. Let’s print a proof to see how it turned out! - Find all of the mistakes, fix, and re-export.
Do this after a good night’s sleep. There’s nothing worse than looking at a printed poster and catching a spelling mistake or an errant list bullet or a …whole …section that you forgot to draw. Especially if you plan to get your poster printed, make sure you sweep through a proof for mistakes before printing a ton of copies.
Yes. Yes, I know that’s a lot of steps, and I can imaaaagine you wincing on the other end of this email. 😬
Why do this the hard way? One big reason:
Posters created as PDFs can be printed at any size. You don’t always know the final form-factor's physical size, but since PDFs are natively vector graphics, they’ll scale well.
If you did decide to use a bitmap, or (worse) to embed a bitmap within your PDF file, you wouldn’t know if the bitmap was high-enough resolution for printing. Let’s say you chose 300dpi or even 600dpi for a letter-sized sheet of paper—if you then needed to print it at a whopping 4 feet by 3 feet for a conference poster session, it might look jaggy, pixelly, aliased.
Whomp-whommmmp, sad trombone sound.
NOW YOU HAVE ALL OF MY POSTER-MAKING SECRETS
ALLLLLLL OF THEMMMM
What would you make a poster about?
How has it been OVER a month already? I don’t know, y’all. I just. don’t. know. It's been way too long.
Let’s check in on the status of codenamed projects!
- [→] No tangible progress on RIO GRANDE, but I went through the process again and updated my notes. Leaving it here as a reminder. Likewise for COLLINS.
- [→] Got a needed part in the mail for HAMMERSTEIN. Working on it on weekends, and 30% done. Hopefully in June.
- [→] Both MUSCULUS and SYD proposals were accepted for November! Starting work on them unofficially now, and in full in early August.
- [✓] SPACE MOUNTAIN is done! I ended up preparing almost 200 slides for the 40-minute presentation on how to design physical spaces, realized in test-runs that it made no sense, and then (with help from friends) trimmed it in half to make (hopefully) a little more sense.
Here's the full deck of annotated slides [24.5MB PDF]. (If you're on mobile, try this one [2MB PDF] instead.) - [✓] The grant proposal for MAXELL is off, thanks to my brilliant colleagues. Won't hear back on that for a while.
- [✓] Another month of MAILLARD in the can. We just finished our third meeting on generating geometric SVG book covers with Rune.js. Next up (on Thursday) is making minimal animations, where we'll be generating animated GIFs with P5.js. What should we do next? Please zap me an email! Personally, I'm excited about working through this book, and this book, and maybe this free course, because I gots so much free time.
- [⋯] Related to MAILLARD, I talked with friends the other night, and decided I need to get BROECKEN done by the end of July. A little over a month should be enough...but it won't be.
- [⋯] ATREYU is now in a soft beta. As this is a lonnnng-running project, THIS IS HUGE, Y'ALL. It still has several kinks to work out, but it worrrrrrrks end-to-end, enough to justify shaving off my "playoff beard." (Biggest lesson recently? Learning how to wrangle super-handy Deferreds/promises in JavaScript to chain a complex sequence of AJAX calls.) Ahead: fixing bugs, fixing more bugs, and working on the next big feature.
- [⋯] Development is starting on JULIAN; I'm only consulting in an advisory role, but there've been several fun whiteboarding sessions. Data models!
- [⋯] Helped facilitate a few in-person card sorts, and have been scheduling more, for FYNBOS, of which JULIAN is a part. Very interesting to see how different groups of people organize and prioritize the same information!
- [⋯] FRIENDS IN PORTLAND, OR! I am heading your way at the end of July(!!) for what I'll dub ODO. (I scored a lottery ticket to attend SRCCON, a small conference on data journalism and newsroom tech, and I am crazy-excited for it.) Will you be around? Do you want to hang out? Do you have an AirBNB to recommend? Drop me a line. :)