June 2, 2008

How much fluorescent photocopy paper does it take to publicize a school event? Change things up and make posters and flyers stand out with a simple technique: a gradient fill or photo background in Publisher. Find out how in this inspiring article for Publisher beginners.

There's a saying in theater that's it's all about butts in seats. Whether you're going straight for the money-making, or trying to attract people to a fun community event, the meaning is clear. It's not a party until you get the people there. How to do that? You've got to get their attention. Before you can consider the posterior regions of your potential audience, it's really all about the eyeballs.

To attract the gaze of those eyeballs for my favorite school and community events, I like posters and flyers. Posters and flyers created with Publisher.

Deep background

I could go on and on about all the things I love to do with Publisher. And depending on the feedback you send about this column, I will. :-) For this edition, I want to focus on something basic: backgrounds. A little fancier than a border around the edge of the page, a background is a simple way to frame the elements of your poster.

There are two background techniques that I like to use:

• A gradient fill
• A photo with a washout effect

A gradient fill looks best, I think, when you can display your poster in color. A photo background looks good in black and white or color. The right photo can also support the theme of your poster.

Fill 'er up

All right, it's not that hard to get a bunch of kids to come to an ice cream social. Nevertheless, consider the difference between this:

And this:

That first one gets the point across, but it's the flyer/poster equivalent of a plain-text e-mail. It will be lost on the announcements board in the school office amidst the 27 other flyers that are photocopied on fluorescent paper, and it sure isn't going to make it up on the fridge at home. No, it's going straight into the recycling bin, if people notice it at all. Graphics and other layout changes aside, the background can help make this poster a sophisticated (but still fun) standout.

Putting a gradient fill (aka "grad fill") in the background of your poster is not hard. Once you've got a publication open, do this:

1. On the Format menu, click Background. You'll see the Background pane open up.
2. The gradient fill backgrounds are listed. Click the one you like.

Customization? How much time have you got?

You are probably realizing based on a quick look at the gradient fill choices that one could spend hoooooooooooooours monkeying around with the direction, color, intensity, hue, saturation, custom palette, one-color, two-color, light-to-dark-and-back-again of each and every one of them. I have. And you could. (In fact, GO FOR IT, when you have the time. It's pretty fun.) But for most quick poster projects, my suggestion is to keep the customizations simple. The background is not the focus of your poster. It's ... the background. It fades for a reason.

A simple one-color to white grad fill works well (those are the ones that Publisher offers first). Two straightforward customizations that I like to do to that simple fill are:

• Match the color to your poster or event. Usually, I'm printing a few of my posters, and they are for kid-friendly events. I like to bump up the intensity of the color in the grad fill to make the poster feel lively, like the event is supposed to be. Maybe your school has school colors. You could use one of those as your grad fill color. Or pick an accent color from a graphic that you are using in your poster and use that as the fill color.
• Change the direction of the shading. Pick a horizontal or vertical grad fill shading style with the color at the edges. That can give your poster a nice frame. Use a shading style that draws the color to the center of the page if you want to anchor the middle of your poster. This can look nice behind a large graphic in the middle of your poster.

Whichever you want to try, you go to the same place:

1. You've still got that Background pane open. Click the More backgrounds link at the bottom of the pane.
2. On the Gradient tab, play with the settings under Colors and Shading styles until you get the look you want.

 More backgrounds link

 I picked One color, selected a nice rich blue, and then dragged the slider to the Light side. (Insert Star Wars reference here.)

 Then I picked a vertical shading style, with the dark bars of color at the left and right edges.

Say cheese

There are a couple of ways to have a photo or graphic be the background of your poster. I'm going to show you one. I use this method because I like to have more control over the degree of washout effect on the photo. Here's an example of a photo as a background on a poster:

The steps for doing this are simple; here's the gist: insert a picture, size it to the size of your publication, then adjust the brightness and contrast until you have the balance you want. It's best to insert the picture first, before any other elements. That way you are always adding things on top of it, and it remains the background. (It's easy to send the photo all the way to the back whenever you want, though.)

Click the Show Me link to see a short demo of how I do it.

Show me 

Become a poster child

You can download a few of the posters I've created here:

• Ice Cream Social Publicity Poster
• Science Fair Poster - "Food" theme
• Science Fair Poster - "My Backyard" theme
• PTA recyling fundraiser flyer

Grab them and make them your own!

About the author

Jessica Reading has worked at Microsoft since 1990. During those early days, she worked in theater in the evenings. When high-tech colleagues would discover her secret life, the usual reaction was, "How cool! That must be so different from what you do here." Uh, actually — not. Making theater and making software look a lot alike behind the scenes. Put a bunch of egos together in a room with little to no natural light and food of questionable nutritional value for days (or weeks, or months) on end. Once the curtain is pulled back, the miracle is revealed — something good, usable, entertaining, fulfilling emerges into the light.