STEP BY STEP FOR CREATING A POSTER

1 Rearranging our content

In our new document we’ve rearranged the graphics and text blocks we want to keep, moving the photographer logo, name and contact information down to the bottom of the document – we’ll treat this as a footer area. Your poster size will depend on the largest size you can print, or get printed, and you can check and change this in the File>Document Setup panel.

3 Creating a title with Artistic Text

We need to add the exhibition title, and for this we’re going to use the Artistic Text tool. What we actually want is a three-deck, or three-line, title, with the word ‘Landscape’ large on the first line, the words ‘photography today’ on the second line and some bullet points about the event on the third line. So in the first frame, we enter ‘LANDSCAPE’ in all capital letters.

5 Adding a semitransparent background

However, you can’t read the text against the photo. To fix this we can place a partially transparent box behind the text, using the Rectangle tool. We drag this below the text in the Layers palette, set the rectangle fill colour to black and the opacity to 60%. We’ve also created a white circle to the left and copied and resized our photographer’s logo to place it on top.

2 Adding a photograph

We’ll start with a photograph which takes up the whole of the document area except for our footer area at the bottom. Use the Picture Frame Rectangle tool to drag out a frame from the top left corner of the document down to the bottom right, leaving just enough space for our footer. Now, with this frame selected, we can use the File>Place command to locate and import our image.

4 Resizing and aligning Artistic Text

Next, we create another artistic text frame with the words ‘PHOTOGRAPHY TODAY’ and a third with the words ‘EXHIBITION • SPEAKERS • WORKSHOP • Q & A’. Now you’ll see the advantage of artistic frame text. We can drag on the corner handles for all three text frames to make them exactly the same overall width, and we can also drag on the centres to position them precisely.

6 Exhibition info and timings

Now we just need the exhibition info and timings. We want three columns here, showing the topic in the first column, the time in the second, and the speakers or title in the third. The easy way to do this is to create a text frame listing all topics, then Alt/ option-drag this text frame to create a copy, then do it again to create the third column. Now we can just type in the information.