The Pros and Cons of Printing B/W vs. Colored Posters

You may already know that posters are one of the fastest and easiest marketing tools for getting the word out quickly about your event, product, or services. What you may have trouble deciding is whether or not your poster printing should be in color or black and white. You've heard that color is the best choice for standing out from the crowd, but is this really the truth or just something that printing companies are pushing? Below are the pros and cons for both black and white posters and colored posters, so that you can decide for yourself what's right for your poster message.

Black & White Pros

Black and white poster printing can be either classically traditional in style or very modern and contemporary depending on the mood you want to set. In terms of advertising and marketing, a contemporary black and white design is probably the best choice. In a sea of color, a black and white poster can really stand out from the crowd. The trick to creating such a poster is to use a design that maximizes contrast, and this is more easily done with a simple modern style which can help save money.

The absence of color forces captivating designs. Black and white posters offer the opportunity to focus on the subject, lighting qualities, context, and perspective of an image in the scene. This is a very useful way to help create a riveting poster, but it will require extra time and effort during design and print preparation.

Black & White Cons

A black and white poster design is a challenge. Most digital images to be used in the poster are color and must be reverted to black and white when they are printed. This is challenging from the technical aspects of a printing press's color mixing program. There are several black and white printing strategies a printer can try out to accomplish the best representation.

In addition to the challenge of the black and white printing process, black and white design can be more challenging than color design. Because the nuances of shading can turn out to be a gray blob in a black and white poster printing, close attention must be paid to contrast during the design process. The information and images must be kept clear and crisp to stand out.

Color Pros
A color poster printing is a project of endless possibilities. While contrast is still important as it is in black and white design, the variation of colors is part of what makes color posters easy to design. Color availability with 4color printing allows for an incredible array of design potential. Using bright, beautiful colors in your poster printing will make it easy to stand out drawing eyes and attention.

Choosing a color poster will make lots of options for graphic design effects available. Any predesigned logos already being associated with your business will easily be represented in color. The ease of design and print setup will make your color poster cheaper to print.

Color Cons
A slight disadvantage to color printing is that it can at times be difficult making colors match. This should not be a big time-consumer for designers or anyone with an eye for color; just make sure the chosen colors for your poster printing are in the same family. The other area most designers stumble into with colored posters is that they can be difficult to keep simple. This is also an easy danger to avoid by limiting the colors (outside of images) that will be used in your poster to only 2 or 3.