PROMOTIONAL ITEM - POSTERS

As an artist, one of the promotional items that I am seeking to produce are posters, which are one of the primary items I am willing to use for my artworks to be put into context for decorative/display purposes. Most of my personal/original works can be used as posters, similar as with many other illustrations out there in the market where artists sell prints of their original pieces. 

Most artists who sell original prints as posters are generally A4-A3 sizes, particularly in events for customers who can easily carry them with ease, compared to A2-A1 posters which will be difficult to carry around and these sizes are often bought through an online store. From my experiences from attending these events, it is clear that the sizes of poster/prints from what I seen are generally A4. Though personally, for this promotional item (posters) I will go for A2 at the least. I will not seek out to get anything bigger than A1 or a movie size poster as they are will take an awful amount of space that people will probably won’t have enough wall space to put them on.

Chosen images from my personal works that I think can be put into context as a poster for decoration purposes. 

Looking at it from a seller’s point of view, I will need to mass print the posters at a relatively cheap cost, while selling each poster for a reasonable amount that will help get back the money from the investment in printing them. I will refer back to the experiences I have from last year and this year’s True Believer’s event, where I sold prints (fanarts at the time) to customers who were interested in my content that I am targeting them with. With the knowledge I have gained from this, I will revisit the website where I had mass printed the prints for those events to see if the cost of printing A2/A1 posters will be at a reasonable amount. 

Knowing how to price products and the amount of money that will be invested towards printing the images is critical as this will help with financial stabilisation and growth if I were to set up an online store to sell prints or/and merchandise in the future, as making money as an artist can be somewhat unstable over the years depending on how many contract and commission work you would be given. 

The website I will revisit is doxdirect, an online printing website that can help you print booklets, leaflets, posters, brochures, etc. which I have used to print some original work and fanarts for last year’s and this year’s True Believers event.

Calculating the cost of printing a single A2 sheet (including the paper weight, process to print and edge-to-edge printing). This is the minimal price (£6.67) I will have to pay in order to print just 1 sheet of A2 paper. 

Printed.com

Looking into another website to see the price of printing a single A2 sheet for a poster on Printed.com. The price is more expensive (£10.50) plus the site also charges £4.50 for a standard delivery, boosting the overall price I will have to pay, unlike doxdirect where the delivery charge will be free for prints costing £1.50 or more. 

Vistaprint

The pricing for an A2 print on this website is £7.49, which is average for its price, though doxdirect is still cheaper (by 82p) however, the more prints you purchase on Vistaprint, the cheaper it gets according to the quantity and the price tag it is tied to, though you would need to purchase 3 or more prints for the deal you will be getting.

Vistaprint offers other customisations for your poster design, including one where you can simply upload your image (which will be the option I would choose) to print large illustrations. 

awesomemerchandise.com

I had quickly looked at Awesome Merchandise, an online website where you can print your design on various products. The price for an A2 print is £15, which is more than twice than the others, which is too much if I were to print a single copy for this module as a promotional item, however the price does become more decent if purchasing more quantities of it, which is good if you were to set up an online shop. 

There is an alternative way to print my promotional item rather than through a website and that is to use the IT facility as they have printers that can print up to A0. The cost is significantly cheaper, roughly £5 for a A0 print according to one of my tutors, which is ideal, however, the downside is that you cannot change the paper that it is already attached to the printer which means I have no choice in choosing paper quality (although it is matter paper which is good) but I am uncertain of how the colours might produce on the paper, as I have some work suffered with very poor colour quality when I used them for my previous projects to print. 

After exploring other printing websites to compare the price tags, I will still choose doxdirect over the others simply because I will only be printing 2 (or 3) different images to show them as my promotional items for the portfolio and promotion module. If I were to mass print them, then yes I will use a different website such as Vistaprint or Awesome Merchandise as the cost of printing in large quantities will be cheaper than printing on doxdirect which will be more expensive, or alternatively (if I was to be in a difficult situation) will print somewhere else like in a studio, etc. where it will not cost as too much. 

My A2 prints of each illustration from doxdirect

Due to the image size of the landscape illustration print it was expected to be printed with a white border as the original size does not fit to scale with an A2 size so I trimmed down the large negative space on the top and bottom of the print. Unlike the A2 portrait image that is printed all the way to the edge of the paper, I decided to leave a tiny white border around as I personally think it looks presentable with it rather than a full edge print. 

The end results of these large scale illustration prints are ok, personally I think the colours could have been a little stronger as the tones looks slightly faded. This could be the case of the type of printer that was being used to print these from the website (most likely a laser print but who knows). Since these are just one-off prints to show what these items are, if I were to mass print them as a sellable product, then yes I will use a different website that will be of a good investment when getting large quantities. I would probably would need to look further into the quality of the printing on each site in the future (for future reference if I were to set up an online store) to see if it is at a high standard, as the prints on each online printing service will vary from one another.