Produce Your Own Posters with Online Printing Services

Chances are that if you are asked to consider hanging posters in your lobby, you’ll have the image of unrolling a two-by-three foot picture and taping it up on the wall, and, of course, your response would be “No thanks!”

Those high school and college room adornments certainly are one kind of poster, but in printing and marketing terms, custom posters are a different thing altogether. Different printers may have some different offerings in the way of posters and different terminology to describe the products, but basically, posters are printed on one side of photo stock and are coated with a matte or gloss finish.

One online printing company, 48HourPrint.com, offers what they call Standard and Large Format Posters. Their standard posters are produced by full color digital printing and range in size from 8.5 by 11 to 24 by 36 inches. You would essentially use these like high quality flyers, ordered by the hundreds.

Large format posters range in size from 18 by 24 inches to 36 by 72, with custom sizes available. They are printed on quality photo stock and prices start at $19 each for the smallest size. These are a high-quality poster that would be used for a special display and not for handing out or stapling on every bulletin board in sight. (Just as an aside, 48HourPrint.com is currently offering 20% off your first order, so if you are going to order posters soon, be sure to check them out.)

What Pictures Make Good Posters?

Image size is the main factor that determines whether your picture will make a good poster. Digital images are made up of tiny dots called pixels. You’ve surely seen pictures that looked like they were made up of fuzzy squares; that’s what happens when your file size is too small and the enlargement process expands the pixels so much that they no longer appear to blend together smoothly.

As a general guideline, for poster printing over 24 by 36 inches, you need a file that is at least 500 KB, and it can be as large as 10 MB. If your picture file is between 250 and 500 kb, you would be better off to limit your poster size to 18 by 24 inches.

A second set of criteria are the resolution, height, and width of the picture. Again, as a general rule, height and width greater than 1,000 will result in a good quality poster as long as the resolution is at least 72 dpi. Depending on the level of detail, some pictures that are smaller will make fine posters. You can always upload yours or e-mail it to an online poster printing service and have the in-house experts take a look at it for you. You’ll want to make sure you deal with someone who specializes in color printing posters if you have special needs. This could be a printing shop that does a lot of other things as well; what you need is to be sure they at least have staff that is expert in the details of poster printing.