You Don't Have to be a Professional to do Our Posters

Recently, I had a client, who, in all seriousness, told me that you don’t have to be a professional to do their posters.

Huh.

I thought about a project I completed last year.

It was an event poster for a winter concert, Christmas songs that were all about journeys – Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem, families traveling to visit relatives.

The organization’s representative was in a quandary on how to represent the spiritual and secular journey on the poster. They suggested just do text and no graphics because they couldn’t think of how to visually both. They didn’t think that splitting the poster in half with an image of Mary and Joseph on one side and a family’s journey on the other would work. I explained that you don’t have to be that literal. We talked about the theme “The Journey”. They talked about some kind of movement or sense of movement, perhaps a comet? Maybe a visual of a snowy path through a winter woods would work? I responded with “Let me see what I can do.”  

Thinking about the title of the concert “The Journey” and what a journey means, I thought that the message for this concert isn’t about the journey but the destination. What I came up with captures that sense of journey to a place while at the same time giving the feeling of something beyond the physical world.

And this takes me back to “you don’t need a professional…” I put it like this: clients have limited tools in their toolbox. They might use bullet points, italics, or bold to highlight text. They might use clip art and center everything. The basics of graphic design and having an eye for composition isn’t there. The ability to see any number of possibilities to visualize their message isn’t there.  

When a client expects the designer to do what they are told then they are not allowing the designer to do their job and the possibilities are lost.

A professional will think and imagine something the client would never think of. Telling the client that they don’t know what they are doing is problematic. Explaining that this isn’t their area of expertise; that it’s the designer’s job to come up with solutions can be misunderstood. Depending on the client, this could come across as having a big ego.

But if I had done what I was told, the first idea presented to me, the client would have had a poster with only text and a logo. They wouldn’t have a poster that they loved and caught the attention of the public.

“You don’t need a professional to…”

Then you don’t need a graphic designer or commercial artist.