How to make an event poster: the five facts first

An event poster is a promise with a date on it. Someone walking past a noticeboard gives it a second or two, and in that time they need to learn what is happening, whether it is for them, and when. Posters fail when the design gets ahead of the facts: a striking image, a clever headline, and the date in small grey type in a corner. Start with the facts and the design has something to serve.

Start with the five facts

Before you open any design tool, write these on a card:

1. What the event is, in plain words.
2. When, with the day of the week, the date and the time.
3. Where, with the venue and the street.
4. What it costs, as the total someone pays.
5. How to get in: book, register, turn up, or buy at the door.

Everything else is optional. A programme, a speaker, a cause, a map: each earns a place only if the poster still reads with the five facts at full size.

The community meeting flyer example shows how firmly a good notice holds to this. Wattle Creek Residents Association letterboxes 1,400 homes for each meeting, and its single issue notice puts the proposal directly under the headline: council proposes to close Furnace Lane to through traffic for twelve months from February. The date, Monday 14 September 2026 from 6:30 to 8:00 pm, and the venue, the Community Hall at 8 Wattle Creek Road, follow before anything about the association itself.

Two optional facts are worth adding more often than they are. The first is who the event is for, because a reader who cannot tell whether they are welcome will not come. The second is access. The bookshop event flyer example is honest about both: Marram Books sells a $15 ticket for sixty seats in the room above the shop, says the fifteen dollars comes off the book on the night, and states in the same panel that the room is up one flight with no lift, with a phone number to call for help. A reader who uses a wheelchair learns that before buying a ticket, not at the bottom of the stairs.

Set the hierarchy by distance

Once the facts are written, size them by how far away each needs to be read. The headline is read from furthest away, so it is largest. The date and place come next. The cost and the action can be smaller, because the person reading them has already stopped.

A useful check is to print the poster at A4, pin it up, and step back three metres. You should be able to read the headline and the date. If you can only read the image, the hierarchy is upside down.

Contrast matters as much as size. WebAIM’s summary of the accessibility guidelines gives a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5 to 1 for normal text and 3 to 1 for large text, which it defines as 18 point or larger, or 14 point bold. Those figures were written for screens, but a date in pale type on a photograph fails a passer by for the same reason.

The concert flyer example adds one thing many event posters need: set times. The Tannery’s date poster and full bill both print Kessler Drive at 8.30, Amber Lowe at 9.40 and Night Ferry at 10.45, because people decide whether to come by when their band plays. The full bill also answers the four questions a venue gets asked every week in one row: doors at 8.00 pm, entry $28, 18 and over.

One image, chosen to show the event

Pick one image, and make it the event rather than a mood. A crowd in the actual room, a runner on the actual course, the actual hall. A stock photograph of people smiling at a laptop tells a reader nothing they can decide on.

Keep the image away from the facts. Text laid over a busy photograph is where contrast fails, so give the date and place a solid panel or a clear area of the image.

Pricing, deadlines and the one action

If there is a cost, print the total. NSW Fair Trading’s pricing guidance says a business cannot promote a price that is only part of the cost unless it also prominently advertises the single total price, and it names booking and service fees as charges that cannot be added without saying up front what they cost.

If there is a deadline, give it the same weight as the date. The fun run flyer example prints the three distances as one block, the 2 km kids run at 7:30 am for $12, the 5 km at 8:00 am for $35 and the 10 km at 8:30 am for $45, and every design repeats that entries close on Friday 30 October, three weekends before the run.

Then give one action. Book online, register by a date, or simply come. A poster that says scan, call, email and follow the page has given four instructions and will get none of them followed.

Sizes for print and social, and where it can go

Make a version for each place the poster will be seen. A4 portrait suits noticeboards and windows. A square post suits a feed, and a story suits a phone held upright. Do not crop one into the other; rearrange it.

Then check where the printed copies can legally go. The City of Sydney says bill posting is an offence, with on the spot fines ranging from $330 for individuals to $400 for businesses. It also runs seven poster pillars as a free and legal way to promote an event, one poster each up to A2, first come first served and cleared every Tuesday, and it treats community notices such as school fetes, garage sales and markets differently from commercial bill posters. Other councils have their own rules.

The table below sets out the five facts, where each belongs on the sheet, and how the example posters handle them, along with four optional extras worth including when they apply.

Common mistakes

The date in the footer. It is the second most important fact on the poster.

A venue name with no street. Locals know the hall; newcomers do not.

A price that grows at checkout. Show the total a person pays.

Several calls to action. Pick one.

A single design stretched to every size. A poster made for A4 and squashed into a square post loses its hierarchy. The exact pixel sizes for each destination are in the flyer sizes guide, and the A4 flyer size in pixels explains the print canvas. For a poster with more to plan, the school event flyer example splits one fair into a bag flyer, a printed programme and a stall holder call.

Build it

The flyer builder has eight canvas sizes, set out on the flyer sizes page: A4 portrait at 1240 by 1754 pixels and A4 landscape for print, and Instagram post, Instagram story, Facebook post, LinkedIn post, Facebook cover and Twitter header for social. Each of the 199 designs is authored natively for all eight, and exports come out at twice the canvas, so an A4 page exports at 2480 by 3508 pixels. Switching size swaps in the design’s own version for that shape and carries your text across. Canvas size is set per page, so a multi page flyer can mix sizes. The resize tutorial shows how to make each version from one design.