Build it
Make it sell
Keep it running
Large format & outdoor
Checked at distance, not at a hundred percent.
Posters, roll-ups, vehicles, trade fair walls. A headline that works on a monitor can disappear on a wall, and the only way to know is to look at it from where people will actually be standing.
The mistake everybody makes
Designed on a screen, seen from a car.
Large format is almost always approved on a monitor, at a comfortable zoom, in a quiet room, with as long as anybody wants to look at it. It will be seen from a moving vehicle, from across a hall, or from the far side of a street — for about two seconds, by somebody thinking about something else entirely.
So the question is not what looks good. It is what survives being reduced to two seconds and thirty metres. Usually that is one image, three or four words, and an amount of empty space that feels wasteful on the screen and is the entire reason the thing works.
The other half is production. Mesh for wind, backlit material changes how the colour reads, and a vehicle has curves and door handles in inconvenient places. We ask the producer what they need before designing rather than afterwards — the same order as with packaging, and for the same reason.
How it is judged
Four distances, starting with the furthest.
We design from thirty metres inwards rather than from the desk outwards. Everything that cannot survive the first distance is decoration for the ones after it.
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30 m
Recognised, not read
What a person takes in
One shape and one colour. Words are not being read at this distance — they are being recognised as a block, the way you recognise a familiar sign before you can make out what it says.
What that means
The whole composition has to work as a silhouette. If it does not register here, nothing later matters: nobody walks closer to something they never noticed.
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10 m
The headline, if it is short
What a person takes in
One line of text, provided it is short enough and set large enough. Four words is generous. Six is optimistic. Eight is a paragraph nobody will finish.
What that means
Type size is decided here, and it is almost always larger than the layout wants it to be. This is where the argument about empty space is actually settled, and it is settled by arithmetic rather than by taste.
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3 m
The one thing to remember
What a person takes in
A second line. A price, a date, a place. This is the distance for the single fact you want somebody to still have in their head an hour later.
What that means
Only people who are already interested get this close. Anything essential has to have been delivered before this point, because most of your audience never reaches it.
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1 m
Detail, if the format has any
What a person takes in
The address, the small print, a code worth scanning. Everything that only exists for the person who has already decided to look properly.
What that means
Relevant on roll-ups and posters people stand beside. On a board by a road this layer does not exist at all — and filling it anyway is how a budget gets spent on something nobody will ever read. The same logic sets the ladder on the design page.
What you receive
Files sized for the wall, not for the screen.
- Artwork at the real sizeBuilt at the actual dimensions or at a clean scale factor, so nothing has to be enlarged by somebody guessing.
- Bleed, trim and safety marginSet for the mounting method — a frame, eyelets, a wrap around an edge and a vehicle all need different amounts.
- A colour proofOn the material it will actually be printed on. Backlit and mesh both change how a colour reads, sometimes considerably.
- A one-to-one sliceA strip printed at full size, so the type can be judged at the distance it will be seen from before ten square metres are committed.
- The right resolution, and no moreWhat the format genuinely needs. Not what a rule of thumb from print magazines says.
- Handover to your producerFiles in their preferred format with the specification they asked for, so the first phone call is the delivery date.
A board beside a road is printed at a small fraction of the resolution most people assume, because it is never seen from closer than twenty metres. Supplying three hundred dots per inch at final size produces a file of several gigabytes that nobody can open — and somebody was paid for the hours that went into making it.
Where exactly will it stand?
Distance, lighting, material, and how long people have as they pass. Those four answers decide most of the design before anybody opens a file — send them and Bianca will tell you what the piece can realistically say.