A poster is read from five metres, not on your screen
A poster is designed sitting down, thirty centimetres from a screen, at 100 % zoom. It is read standing up, from five metres, while walking, with two seconds of attention and often under bad lighting.
That gap explains almost every failed poster. They are not ugly — they are illegible at the distance where people meet them.
The five-metre test
There is a check that costs nothing and almost nobody runs: print your poster at A4, pin it to the wall, take five steps back and look.
If you cannot tell what it is about within two seconds, the poster needs redoing. Not tweaking: redoing, because the problem is structural. Too much information sits at the same level, and the eye has no way in.
Three levels, no more
A poster that works reads in three stages, at three distances.
From far, the subject must land: one word, one image, one colour. That decides whether someone steps closer or walks on.
From two metres, the essentials: what, when, where. Three pieces of information, not eight.
From one metre, the detail: price, contact, legal lines, QR code. Nobody reads that level from a distance, and that is fine — it is not meant for that.
If all three levels share the same type size, there are no levels at all. Hierarchy does the work, not the amount of information.
Contrast matters more than colour
On a screen, light text on a light background stays readable because the screen emits its own light. On paper pinned in a badly lit corridor, the same combination disappears.
It is the same reasoning applied to interfaces, where contrast is calculated rather than eyeballed. On a poster the rule of thumb is simple: if you have to squint at the preview, it is already lost in real conditions.
Watch out for fine, elegant typefaces too. A high-contrast face, beautiful as a large heading on a website, becomes fragile in print at small sizes on absorbent stock.
Format and substrate change everything
An A3 in a window, an A1 on a board, a roll-up in a lobby and a poster pasted outdoors share neither reading distance nor paper constraints. An outdoor substrate needs moisture and UV resistance that standard paper does not have.
For common formats, printing goes through Copifac, rue des Arènes in Limoges: paper chosen on site, a proof you can check, and collection without shipping costs — which counts when the poster goes up tomorrow. They also print stickers and textiles, which opens options paper cannot offer: a window decal lasts months outdoors, shrugs off rain, and reads from the street without taking up space inside. For very large format or long-term outdoor use, we look together at the right supplier for the substrate.
What gets prepared upstream
A poster moves fast when the brand already exists. Colours are set, type is chosen, the logo has a large-format variant. All that is left is composition.
When none of that exists, every poster restarts from zero and ends up matching neither the previous ones nor the website. That is the point of handling brand identity before the assets, rather than reconstructing it asset by asset.
The service is detailed here, and prices are public.
What to take away
Print at A4, take five steps back. It is the most profitable test in print, it takes two minutes, and it will stop you printing a hundred copies of something nobody will read.