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Grin and Bear It!
The Handy Do-It-Yourself Poster Kit

A poster can turn every telephone pole and store window into a messenger for your library. Posters are a versatile and flexible medium for your messages — produced in small numbers on a copy machine they can fill your library and produced in huge numbers by a commercial printer they can blanket your county.

For this campaign we have produced artwork that you can turn into a custom poster in either furious color or stately black and white. Customize to suit your needs and your budget.

Your poster will be customized version of the one used by the San Francisco (Calif.) Public Library for their very successful 2001 amnesty campaign. It features a cartoon graphic portraying a couple of friendly bears and piles of library books. If you know bears you'll know that they tend to accrue lots of overdue fines during hibernation. And these bears, from by nationally known cartoonist Phil Frank, are sorely in need of an amnesty program — just as some of your patrons may be.

What Comes In The Kit

The poster is laid out in tabloid (11" x 17") size, vertical (portrait) orientation — a standard size for copiers and commercial printers. We provide a TrueType font (Mom's Typewriter), a headline graphic and a main image graphic in color and in grayscale. We also show you the layout of the poster and specify fonts, font sizes, and specifications for building you own poster.

Download the bits & pieces here (right-click and press "save..." for Windows — alt-click on Mac to save files):

• A two-page Acrobat file of color and b&w sample posters so you can see what your own poster might look like: sample_poster.pdf - 255KB

• The color headline graphic: headline-cmyk.jpg - 294KB (see frank.zip below)

• They grayscale headline graphic: headline-grey.jpg - 116KB (see frank.zip below)

• The color main graphic: phil_frank_cmyk.jpg - 726KB (see frank.zip below)

• They grayscale main graphic: phil_frank_grey.jpg - 381KB (see frank.zip below)

• All of the above graphics compressed into frank.zip - 1.3MB (extract with Winzip for Windows or Stuffit for Mac)

• Mom's Typewriter Font: MType.zip - 71KB (extract with Winzip for Windows or Stuffit for Mac) (This and other fonts and graphics are available at http://www.fontsnthings.com/)

What You Need In Your Tool Box

You will need to build your poster in a PostScript page layout program. Among these are Adobe PageMaker, QuarkExpress and Microsoft Publisher. You could also use a draw program such as Illustrator, FreeHand or CorelDRAW! While it may be possible to do the job in MS Word, it will be difficult and is not recommended (unless you go with the stone tools approach — the third to last paragraph below). A PostScript printer is nice if you have one, otherwise you can distill an Acrobat file and print to a non-PostScript device from Acrobat. For commercial printing PostScript is required. If you have some of this software and a PostScript printer in your library you are in great shape, otherwise drop by a service store such as Kinkos or take the specifications and graphics to a commercial printer and have them assemble the poster to your requirements — the time required for the entire assembly process should be less than one hour. There is a place for your library's logo on the poster and it's nice to put one there if you have the logo artwork.

Some Assembly Required

The process to assemble the poster is just that — assembly. This is a simple task and will not require Leonardo da Vinci to do the job. Remember — it's your poster — feel free to change anything — or everything — to suit yourself. The exception to that broadly empowering statement is that you can't change the Phil Frank artwork. You must leave the cartoon as-except for size is and have the copyright notice visible. If you can't "bear" the artwork you can use something else of your own choosing. The color poster should be printed on white stock — the black and white one can be done on any color stock and in any color ink. But please try to be tasteful.

Here's the "how-to" on creating the poster (our version) in 9 easy steps:

1. Install the Mom's Typewriter font and open a new 11" x 17" page in your page layout software and set the margins to reflect the output/reproduction devices (printer or photo copier) you intend to use — our sample is top, right, left = 0.5"; bottom = 0.7". This means that the content elements of the poster will not go to the edge of the paper. If your commercial printer asks you if the poster "bleeds" he's not talking about paper cuts — "bleed" means that the printing will run past the paper edge. In this case the correct (and cost-saving) answer to that question is "no bleeds."

2. Import the main graphic and the headline into the poster in the approximate positions shown on the sample. For a color poster use the color graphics and for a black and white poster use the grayscale graphics (!). The graphics should not need to be sized except in CorelDRAW, some versions of which import JPEG images in strange sizes. If the graphics do not import to the correct sizes you may want to resize to the native dimensions as follows:
   Headline graphic = 8.617" x 2.707"
   Main graphic = 8.093" x 8.55"

3. Above the headline graphic, type your library name in 30-point Mom's Typewriter — centered on the page.

4. Below the main graphic, type the line "Overdue Books Amnesty" in 30 point Mom's Typewriter — and the dates of your campaign in 36-point Mom's Typewriter — both centered. On the color poster we colored the date copy C=65;M=50;Y=22;K=30 which is a dark blue gray.

5. Below item 4, type the informational copy in 16-point Times (Times Roman, Times New Roman, etc) with 25-point line spacing (use the word "leading" for "line spacing" and impress your printer) — centered. The copy we used on the sample is:
   
   "Bring those overdue books out of hibernation and enjoy fine-free days at your Public Library from April 6 - April 12, 2002. Return your overdue materials to the any branch of the library. The amnesty does not include overdue fines still on record from previously returned materials."
   
   We picked those dates because they coincide with National Library Week. You will want to change the dates to reflect those for your program and you probably will want to add your library name in there someplace. Change the branch reference to reflect whether or not you have those things and generally spiff up the copy to suit.

6. Below item 5, type the line "Materials returned need to be in good condition." in 20 point Mom's Typewriter — centered.

7. Import your library logo at the bottom of the page in any compatible format (TIFF, JPEG, EPS, PICT, etc.) — centered.

8. Look over the whole "shootin' match" and adjust the elements vertically until the poster looks right.

9. Save the file, kick back with your favorite beverage or snack and bask in the warm glow of a job-well-done.

If The Pieces Don't Fit

Our poster was done in PageMaker 6.5 on Windows and all of the typesetting was done with no special tracking or letter spacing (call letter-spacing "kerning" and further impress your printer). On other systems and other software, your mileage may vary. Do a quick "reality check" as you put the pieces together and if something looks crazy or if you have strange line breaks change size, copy, kerning (that word again) or put in some soft line breaks — whatever works — so that it looks right. You can't break the rules because there aren't any.

For a color poster — commercially printed or printed to a color PostScript printer — you will want to define your colors (if you are changing colors) using CMYK color space. This is sometimes referred to as "4-color process printing" where CMYK stands for "Cyan," "Magenta," "Yellow," and "blacK." When you mix those colors in the right combinations on a printed page you can get all of the colors of the rainbow. The color JPEG graphics for the Headline and main image are in CMYK format and will "color separate" from your page layout software into the C,M,Y and K plates for commercial printing. If you are having trouble viewing those graphics (in a Web browser for example) it's probably because the software that you are using is not CMYK compatible — computer monitors use an RGB ("Red," "Green," "Blue") color space. Professional photo imaging software such as PhotoShop will allow you to view graphics of all sorts color spaces and also convert from one space to another. Some of the free photo software such as the goodies that ship with digital cameras are strictly RGB.

Mom's Typewriter is a TrueType font for Windows. Windows handles TrueType fonts very well in PostScript applications and you should not have PostScript issues with that font on Windows. Mac and Linux machines are much more fussy about fonts so if you are working on those platforms — all bets are off. If you have trouble with Mom's Typewriter on a Mac or Linux machine try to find a similar "distressed" typeface for your platform.

If this whole exercise starts to become one of the trials of Job, and all you have is a word processor, it's time to get out the stone tools and start chipping. Import the graphics into the word processor and print them to a decent black and white printer. Type each of the items above into the word processor (making sure that the margins are set so that the total width of each element does not exceed 10 inches) and print them also. Trim the paper so that each element is on its own little sheet. Using a glue-stick or spray cement (get the kind that allows repositioning) plop each element on an 11" x 17" piece of cardstock in its proper place. Take to the copy machine and run your prints. In the graphic design trade this used to be called "paste-up" and it is the way every printed page was done before Steve and Woz invented desktop computers. It worked just fine then and, for black & white at least, it will work just fine now.

And lastly, (put here just for folks who start projects without reading all of the instructions first — you know who you are) Mom's Typewriter doesn't have a numeral one or a zero. Use the lower case letter L ("l") and the capitol letter O ("O") respectively for those characters.

Have fun with your poster!