Every month I create promotional posters for the free monthly online meetup organized by Perth Digital Accessibility Group. Although we publish those posters on various social media, the highest engagement comes from LinkedIn. The topics of these talks are generally very technical, so I resort to a default poster template. But once in a while, a topic will be sent to me that offers an opportunity to make a departure from the “dry” poster template.
This month, Robert Turner gave me that opportunity!
The ‘Plain Vanilla’ Poster
Robert Turner is a plain language advocate with a strong interest in the role of structure and architecture. He works as Content Design Capability Lead for the Health Products Regulation Group advising the Therapeutic Goods Administration and the Office of Drug Control. The group is part of the Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing.
Robert sent me the following text about his topic ‘Content cookery: information architecture insights from the kitchen pantry.’
What if information architecture was as easy as sorting your kitchen pantry?
Structure content perfectly using principles you already know: keep the fresh, throw away the stale, label everything, don’t put pickles on the cereal shelf!
This analogy gave me an opportunity to design a poster with an anchor image that will grab eyeballs on social media.
The ‘Sticky Note’ Poster
From the Magnific stock image website, I downloaded a kitchen pantry shelf photo that already had two blank sticky notes. My only jobs were to place the text on those sticky notes, make a “notch” on the blue highlight banner in front of the orange sticky note, and move the green sticky note a little bit towards the right so that everything aligns with the same vertical grid.
On the poster, we have four distinct sections on a white canvas.
- An Anchor image showing the kitchen cabinet with some jars and two blank sticky notes.
- An overlay section with a text layer showing a hand-written note and PDAG logo — both are aligned with the blank sticky notes below.
- A blue section with a match cut for the orange sticky note below. It also carries the title of the talk.
- A white section with the event details, QR code, partner logos.
The typeface used on this poster is Atkinson Hyperlegible Next designed by the Braille Institute of America. I have used different weights and sizes of this typeface for content hierarchy. Just Another Hand typeface in regular weight is used for the text on the orange sticky note.
More ‘Kitchen Pantry’ Posters
Click on the image to see the LinkedIn post.
Two more anchor images are downloaded from Magnific.com to create two more versions of the poster. The major change in these posters is the use of Freestyle Script typeface instead of ‘Just Another Hand.’
Click on the image to see the LinkedIn post.
Compared to the campaigns using the default poster template, we received around 30% more engagement on LinkedIn. I’m trying my best to create more topic-oriented imagery on the posters for the upcoming talks as well. It is not easy, but wish me luck!
