How To Improve Typography For Custom Posters

One of the big features for any custom posters is the title and its design. This typography for custom posters is something that a lot of designers concentrate on initially for poster printing. Since the title of a poster can sometimes make or break the design and its impact, care is always taken to make it as good looking as possible.

In this article we will teach you how to improve your typography for your posters using Adobe Photoshop. While advanced users may just get bored by this, novices can definitely learn a few interesting techniques that can make all the letters and numbers on a custom poster come alive.

1. Adjusting font or character dimensions. The first thing that you should learn is that you can change not only the relative size of your font, but you can also control the actual font or character dimensions. You can set a character style's letter width and height by just adjusting the character properties. The easiest way to do this is to just select the font that you want to adjust and press control + T. This should make the dialog window appear with the adjustments for characters. The big T and wide T icons should represent the vertical and horizontal scales for the font characters.

Just adjust the percent counters to the values that you want and you should see your character fonts change immediately. Take note that you can also adjust the vertical spacing as well as the character spacing of fonts on the same window. These tools can let you adjust the text itself precisely giving you full control of how the typography will look and behave.

2. Using colors gradients. Besides the text itself, another property that you can easily adjust is the font's color. Of course you should already know how to change a font's basic color, but how about using color gradients? Color gradients are a color scheme wherein one color seamlessly changes to the next throughout the span of a canvass, or in this case the text. Color gradients give a nice effect on text making them look more alive and dynamic.

You can easily change your text to use color gradients by just adjusting the blending options of the particular layer that you want to edit. Just go to the blending options window by right clicking on layer that you want and clicking on the item “blending options”. Once the window appears, you can tick the gradient overlay option and you should be able to adjust and choose the color gradients that you want. This can be a nice way to add in a dynamic color scheme to your text.

3. Adding shadows. Next, shadows are a time honored effect for typography. This makes your text come out of the custom posters “lifting” them in a sense. You can easily add this to your text by enabling blending options in the text layer and choosing shadows. Just right click on the layer you want in the layer list and choose the blending options item in the context menu.

In the blending options dialog window you should be able to tick the text box for shadows to enable it. Once selected you can just play with the shadow options and see what looks best.

4. Embossing text. Besides shadow effects though, you can also add in an embossed effect on the same blending options dialog window. Embossing basically makes your layer look three dimensional. For text or typography this is a nice effect making the poster design look very three dimensional as well as view the text.

5. Playing with textures. Textures are also something that you can apply in the blending options dialog window for your text. Just tick on its check box and then choose from the different textures that are available. These textures add in some gritty detail to your typography making them look as if they were made from a certain type of material. This may make your typography look more real and substantial depending on your texture style.

6. Changing the text opacity. Finally, you can also play with the text opacity. By changing the opacity settings you can make your text look faded or you can integrate them to other design elements as watermarks or design features.

Those are just 6 of the myriad of ways to improve your typography. For novices though, these effects are a good start to play with. Remember however that your imagination is the limit when it comes to design, so test and play with all your ideas and all the tools in Photoshop until you get the best affect that you want for your typography in poster printing.