You don’t need a design background to make a good poster. But a handful of core principles—borrowed from design thinking and adapted for humanities work—can transform a cluttered draft into something that actually communicates.
Hierarchy is about guiding the viewer’s eye. Not everything on your poster is equally important, and your design should make that obvious. The title should be the first thing people read from several feet away. A key image or question should pull them closer. Supporting details come last.
Ask yourself: if someone glances at your poster for three seconds, what do they see? If the answer is “a wall of text” or “lots of boxes” your hierarchy needs work. Make important things big. Make secondary things smaller. Use whitespace to separate them.
Alignment and proximity create order. When elements on your poster share a common edge or centerline, or when they are closer to each other than other things, the whole composition feels intentional rather than scattered. Misaligned elements—a title slightly off-center, text blocks at inconsistent margins—create a subtle sense of disorder and unease if not confusion.
Pick an alignment strategy and commit to it. Left-aligned text with consistent margins is a strong default. Center-aligned can work for titles and short text, but a fully centered poster often looks like a wedding invitation.
Repetition builds consistency. When you use the same font for all your headings, the same accent color for emphasis, and the same spacing between sections, you create a visual language that helps the viewer navigate your poster without thinking about it.
This is where most first-draft posters struggle—five different fonts, three different text sizes that don’t correspond to any hierarchy, colors chosen at random. Pick two fonts (one for headings, one for body text), one or two accent colors, and stick with them everywhere.
The best way to start is not in PowerPoint or Canva—where it’s too easy to get locked into whatever you dragged and dropped on the canvas—but on paper. Sketch a few rough layouts with boxes representing images and lines representing text. Experiment. Try your title at the top, then try it across the middle. Sketch out the visual hierarchy. See what happens when the main image takes up a quarter of the poster.
Once you have a layout you like, start to build it digitally. Iterate. Again. And again. Just try to clean up one little detail each time you look at it. If you can’t get something to feel right, it’s probably not that you’re missing a minor adjustment, but need to step back and rethink. Sketch again!
Canva, Google Slides, and PowerPoint all work for poster layout. When you’re ready to print, our poster printing guide walks through the process with the studio’s HP DesignJet printer.
The goal isn’t perfection. It’s intentionality and connection. It’s making something that communicates your ideas visually—and learning something about your own argument in the process.