Poster Printing

Do you need posters?

Then you came to the right page! Here you'll learn how to print the poster or flyers of your dreams. It's also a great way to print art or photos for any picture frames you have.

Printing a poster is easier than stickers from a technical standpoint, but there are some important factors you should take into consideration before you print.

Planning for success

  1. Poster Size

Plan ahead of time for how big you'd like your poster to be. Think realistically about how large a paper you want to have for your wall. It's a good idea to measure your available open space, or double-check the dimensions of your picture frame.

The three size considerations are: margins, length, and nesting.

Margins are the (usually) white borders around an image. Will you want a wide margin? Or none at all? you'll need to factor this into your size calculations.

Length-- if your poster is extremely long, like a banner, you may run into some trouble. Although the machine can technically print a lengthy design all the way to the end of the roll, the longer the poster, the more likely it is that it'll become off-center. The paper is well-aligned, but not perfect. If you need a very long poster, take this into account to try and minimize wasted material from failed attempts.

Nesting, in this case, means putting multiple images in one row. Basically, printing two or more posters side-by-side, instead of only one poster surrounded by a bunch of wasted white space. By downsizing your poster a little, you will save massive amounts of print-time and material.

2. Image Size

How big is the actual image you want to print? If it's too small, you'll end up with a blurry and distorted poster.

Make sure your image is a large resolution-- at least 1000 pixels on each side, preferably more for posters of any significant size. You'll also want a high DPI-- Dots Per Inch. This is essentially how detailed an image can be; how many different-colored pixels it can store in each square inch. For printing, generally 300 dpi is the minimum. You can print with lower, but it will turn out grainy and aliased.

Basically-- don't find a 4" x 6" photo and try to print it at 20" x 30"!
It will look terrible. The less you have to blow up-- or increase the scale of-- your image, the better.

3. Material

Finally, what kind of paper do you want to print on? The makerspace currently has 4 kinds of paper suitable for poster/flyers:

  • Butcher paper (plain white and thin. Excellent for batches of flyers.)

  • RolyPoly Banner Film (ol' reliable of poster papers.)

  • Paparazzi Premium Matte Paper (A bit thicker than the RolyPoly. For heavier duty needs.)

  • Solvent Satin Canvas (Semi-fabric material. Best for extended outdoor use-- not flyers)


formatting

  1. Create a new file in Illustrator.

    1. Make the initial height and width your intended dimensions.

    2. make sure you're in CMYK color mode-- this is the color mode of Printers, which use Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow ink to make different colors. ((Digital displays use RGB, Red Green Blue. it's the difference between how pigments vs light interact-- look it up sometime!))

    3. Set Raster Effects to High (300 ppi)


  1. File > Place & Embed your image.

    1. Embed is located in the properties menu.

    2. Don't resize your image yet! Check in the properties menu to see how big it is-- you may need to reconsider your choice if it's too small.

    3. You may want to crop your image at this point if there are unnecessary sections along the edges.


Here's two different sized examples:

The Empire poster on the left is roughly 7 x 8 inches-- this is far too small to resize without serious grain issues. In contrast, the Vogue poster on the right is already 20 x 26 inches-- it can be printed at its current size without issue, or even shrunken down a bit.


3. Align it!

Use the second and fifth rectangle icons-- those that have the line centered in the rectangles-- to align your image to the exact center of the Artboard.

This ensures you won't have uneven margins.


4. Artboard crop

See the black square on the left? That is our Artboard, and it is too small. When we save out the PDF, it will crop everything not included in the artboard.

3. Use the Artboard tool (shift+O) to either drag the document bigger, or change its size precisely using the height and width variables in the Properties menu. On the Right, you can see I've expanded the Artboard-- and even given my poster a nice margin frame.

5. Saving

Once you're happy with the size, margins, etc of your poster, and have made any edits you need to, save your piece as a PDF.

You may have noticed that we did not make a cut-line like we do with stickers. You do not need it! The printer paper can't be cut like the stickers can-- it damages the blade.

Your poster will be aligned in one corner by the Versaworks setup program, and the back end will be cut at the edge of the PDF. Thus, you will only have to manually cut one side.

Print your poster at its saved size, or else try to only downsize in the Versaworks program. Remember, the bigger you make it, the more detail you lose! Remember to print efficiently, without wasting material. Try to fill out the row.