Typography Design Tips to Make Your Poster Stand Out

Do more with less typography

Fewer fonts (two is enough), fewer design elements to avoid visual clutter, and fewer different colors will make your poster better and more effective.

Design to attract attention

Think about a billboard, it's just a giant poster stuck on a building for people in cars. And you only have about three seconds to grab their attention and deliver a clear, memorable message. Too many elements make it impossible, so do more with less. Using a billboard mockup can help you experiment with different design elements. Start by choosing the right font to grab attention.

Choose the right font

If you're new to typography and fonts, you'll learn a lot from our free typography and layout course and our print advertising course. Your first choice is whether a Serif or Sans-serif font is best suited for your poster. Serif fonts have small decorative details at the ends of the letters. Sans-serif fonts have no decorative details, they are more minimalist and geometric, giving them a more modern, minimalist look.

Best fonts for posters

Sans-serif fonts are the best choice for headlines because they are minimalistic and bold. Which specific font is best for your poster really depends on the aesthetic and message of your poster.

Distance

Line spacing

The space between lines of text is called leading. Too much space between lines of text and your headlines and subheadings can look disjointed and harder to read. And if the line spacing is too tight, your subheadings can disappear into the main headline, again making the headline harder to read. Consider readability when changing your line spacing.

Space between letters

Letter spacing can have a huge impact on the readability of your poster. Letter spacing that is too wide or too narrow will make your text too hard to read, so adjust accordingly and remember to test for readability.

Layout is very important

Once you have your font, it's time to start tweaking the placement and arrangement of your poster text. Your goal with poster text is to make it as readable as possible. If your text is too small or there's too much of it, the background is too cluttered or distracting, or anything else that reduces readability, your poster won't be as effective as it could be.

Interface

Your background image is important to establishing readability on your poster. Make sure there is enough blank space to place text.

The conductors

One way to create a layout where the image and text complement each other is to align your text to fit within a shape or border in the image. Another way is to think of the layout more broadly as just an image as a background with text on top. These two can be arranged in countless ways — so let your creativity run wild.

Set the highlight

A good layout has a clear focal point — a visual element that is appealing and eye-catching. In the context of a layout that only includes images and text, it would be one of the two. So you'll need to decide which is more important and make it stand out.

Eye catching images

If you're designing a poster for a travel destination, it makes sense to make the focus an image of the location. You can lighten the text and make it smaller (but still legible) to keep the focus on the image.

Eye-catching text

Conversely, a poster for a business might want to use an oversized uppercase font for the title and a transparent layer over the image to keep the focus on the text. Try creatively cropping your text or image to combine them for a really eye-catching poster.

Marvin Fry

Update 10 December 2024