In Plain Sight
Some people can make an event feel real before it happens. Given a blank sheet and a date, they work out what a passer-by must see first, what can be smaller, and which word does the pulling. The thing gets put up and people start asking about it. You'd notice this in the one who redraws the village hall notice and suddenly the hall is full.
The Pattern at Work
The poster has one job, and it is not to be looked at. It is to be read at an angle, in passing, by somebody going somewhere else.
So the first decision is ranking. Everything that could go on the sheet gets put in order of what a stranger needs: usually the thing itself, then when, then where, then the small print nobody reads until they have decided. Most bad posters fail here rather than in the drawing, giving equal weight to the name of the act, the sponsor, the ticket price and a quotation from last year. Ranking is brutal and mostly consists of making things smaller. The image and the words are ranked together, because a picture that competes with the headline has taken the headline's place and the sheet now says nothing at a distance. A person doing this well can say, without hesitating, what the sheet is for.
The second half is knowing who is walking past. The same event needs a different sheet for a school corridor, a pub window and a shop counter, and the difference is not decoration but what gets ranked first: a parent needs the date, a student needs the price, somebody who has never heard of it needs a reason. That is where the talking comes in, because the information usually arrives from an organiser who is too close to it and lists everything as equally important. Getting a usable brief out of them is half the work and is done by asking who they actually want to come. The answer is almost never everybody, though that is what gets said first.
What the Examples Show
It gets read as being artistic, or as a knack for design, or as a willingness to do the poster nobody else wanted.
The first element is ranking. Everything that could go on the sheet is put in order of what a stranger needs, and most of the work is deciding what becomes small.
The second is that words and image are ranked together. A picture that competes with the headline has taken its place, and the sheet stops working at the distance it has to work at.
The third is that the audience decides the sheet. The same event needs a different poster for a school corridor and a pub window, and finding out who is actually wanted there is usually a conversation with somebody too close to answer it.
Going Deeper
The show bill is one of the oldest forms of printed persuasion and it was shaped by what a press could do. Wood type existed because metal type could not be cut large enough, which is why old playbills stack lines of wildly different sizes: each line was set in whatever was to hand, and the size differences carried the ranking. Circus and theatre bills pushed this to its limit, cramming a whole programme onto one sheet that still read from a passing cart, and those conventions still work.
Lithography changed it again by making a large image cheap, which produced the poster as a picture with a few words rather than a page of words with a picture. The trade split after that into designers and printers, and the hand-drawn bill survived mainly in fairgrounds, wrestling, music and rural events, where it still signals something a typeset sheet does not. Screen printing kept it alive for gig posters. What did not change is the two-second problem, which is the same on a wall and on a phone.
The costs are small-scale and persistent. Almost nobody employs a poster artist, so the work arrives as commissions from organisers who have no budget and often no brief, and a lot of it is done for a share of the door or for nothing. Templates have made everyone their own designer, which has not reduced the need but has removed most of the fee. And the work is disposable by nature: it goes up, it does two weeks of work in the rain, and it comes down, and the only evidence it worked is a room that filled.
The Image
Squinting at it from the far side of the room.
The sheet pinned to the wall, the artist backed off as far as the room allows, eyes half shut so the detail goes and only the big shapes survive.
Whatever is still legible is what the poster says. Everything else is a decoration that the person hurrying past will never receive. Most sheets fail this test, and most people who make them never run it.
Where It Stops
Being able to draw is not this. Plenty of good illustrators make posters that look excellent in the hand and disappear on a wall, because the skill is ranking rather than rendering.
It goes wrong as a picture that eats the message. A drawing good enough to enjoy invites people to enjoy it, and a sheet that is admired at arm's length while nobody registers the date has failed in the way that is hardest to see.
It also fails where the reader has already decided. A programme, a ticket or a page somebody has sat down with wants the information laid out plainly, and shouting at a reader who is paying attention is simply rude.
Take the plainer explanation first. Anybody who makes a few posters gets better at them. The test is whether things are made smaller on purpose.
Where It Pays
Inside a job. Poster and promotional design for theatres, festivals, venues, clubs and cinemas; event and exhibition graphics; signage and wayfinding for public events; and the display end of retail and market trading. Also the visual side of campaigning, where a single sheet has to work on a wall, and title and key-art design for film and publishing.
What is being bought is people turning up. A venue can tell the difference between a run that sold and one that did not, and the poster is one of the few variables they control, so a designer with a record of filling rooms is kept and recommended. Festivals and theatres hire on that history rather than on a portfolio's looks.
Where it pays badly is the small end, which is most of it. Local events have no budget, templates have convinced organisers the work is free, and a great deal of it is done as a favour or for a share of the takings.
Outside one. Posters for a friend's band, a school fair, a community campaign, a village hall. The cost worth naming is that a badly ranked sheet in a shop window becomes physically hard to walk past.
Try This
Find a poster for something happening near you and write down, in order, the first three things you took in.
Now write down what the organisers most needed you to know. If those two lists do not match, the sheet has failed, and you can usually see exactly where.
Redraw it roughly. Keep one thing large. Make everything else smaller than feels comfortable. Cut one whole item off the sheet.
Pin it up and look from across the room with your eyes half closed.
Ranking the sheet is a tool, not a self. Pick it up where somebody has two seconds and is walking past. Set it down for anything a reader has already sat down with.
If This Isn't You
Plenty of people see a poster, register the date and go, which is the whole point of it. Not noticing how it was built means somebody built it properly.
Where To Go Next
Its near-twin — Show-Painter. Both make images that have to work across a field. Show-Painter is painting the thing itself, loud and huge, and the picture carries all of it. This one works with words and image together, and will happily shrink a picture to let a date be read.
Its shadow — Form-Etcher. Form-Etcher spends its attention on letter shapes and the gaps between them, invisible and exact. This one would take a badly spaced sheet that fills the room over a beautifully spaced one that does not.
Most often confused with — Image-Maker. Both work until the sheet matches something in the head. Image-Maker is answering to a picture only they can see. This one is answering to a stranger walking past, and will abandon a good drawing the moment it stops helping.