What is the best Poster Design Software?
The industry is flooded with Poster Design Softwares but we’re only going to recommend the most commonly used by designers across the poster designing industry.
Sure you can go online find templates and customise it to your liking but what’s the fun in it? In fact we’re only going to recommend Adobe software’s because we know that they work well.
Adobe Photoshop:
The most famous poster design softwares out of all of them is Adobe Photoshop. Developed and published by Adobe in the 90’s, Photoshop is a raster graphics editor. The software has become industry standard for raster graphics and digital art as a whole.
You can edit and compose your poster in multiple layers using mask support, alpha compositing and several colour modes like RGB and CMYK. You must always use CMYK colour mode when you’re creating anything for the purpose of printing.
CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and black which compose of the main 4 colours. RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) is purely used for screen based graphics.
Although CMYK are the main colours, modern poster printing machines use 8-ink system for extra depth and vibrant colours.
Adobe Photoshop uses PSD and PSB file formats to support these features but users can export their graphics in number of different file formats like JPEG, PNG, TIFF and more.
We recommend sending the original PSD file format for printing shops so that they can export it according to what supports their machines. PSD is also useful if you require modification to your graphics after you’ve sent it to your print shop.
You must always use at least 600 dpi (dots per inch) when designing your poster regardless of the chosen software.
For the highest quality you can set your resolution to 1440 Dpi.
Remember to always save your files time to time so you can retrieve it even if the software or machine crashes.
You must also remember to set desired poster size before start doing anything on Photoshop as your graphics can result in loss of quality if you need to enlarge it later on.
Adobe Illustrator:
Illustrator is a vector based graphics editor which is often used for drawing illustrations.
Unlike bitmap images that Photoshop uses, Illustrator uses mathematical equations to draw out the shapes.
Setting your preferred size is not necessary as it can be scaled up later on. We recommend you set your size because it can help to know exactly how much space you’ve got to work it.
As they’re in the same family, Adobe Illustrator files can be opened on Adobe Photoshop if required. Although the colour mode can be changed on illustrator, it is advisable to always work on CMYK. This is because RGB colours won’t support CMYK which can result in completely different colour when printing.
Adobe Indesign:
Also part of good poster design softwares, Indesign is made for designing Posters, Magazines, flyers, brochures and newspapers, InDesign features tools that are especially useful for creating content for publishing.
InDesign is also a vector based program but unlike Illustrator InDesign has the ability to handle multiple pages and master pages so you can easily create magazine layout or books.
With the feature like automatic page numbering, all pages are linked to an editable master page. Designers in the industry usually use InDesign to bring together all their artwork from Photoshop and Illustrator.
Ultimately you must use all three software as a designer but for poster printing either one of them will do.
The use of Microsoft PowerPoint to create your posters:
Microsoft’s PowerPoint is most commonly used to create presentation slides so we do not recommend it.
Large format printing require the graphic to be high definition and at least 600Dpi (dots per inch) in resolution. However; PowerPoint can only export in 72Dip and is not suitable for large format printing. Our recommended software for designing your graphic for large format printing is Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator.
Click here for our recommended poster printer in London.
Do you need tips and tricks to design your poster? Click here