How To Make Motivational Posters

You’ve probably seen tons of motivational posters. Now you can make your own just by uploading a photo to one of the Web sites below. Or, you can design your own motivational poster that looks totally different from the traditional one you see everywhere.

Making A Non-Traditional Motivational Poster
1. If you’re making your own non-traditional looking poster, you can easily create one in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint.

a. Open PowerPoint. Create a single slide – this will be your poster. Set the proportions of the document so that it enlarges to poster size without distorting your image or text. Go to File—Page Setup and specify what kind of poster print size you want.

Click on View—Grid and Guides and choose the Display Grid on Screen box. This will allow you to line up the poster elements for a more professional look.

b. Open Word. Create your poster as a single side of A4 by going to Page Setup from the File menu. Word doesn’t have guides like PowerPoint and other graphics applications, but you can set up a grid by going to the Drawing toolbar (View—Toolbars—Drawing) and then choose Draw—Grid. Check the Display Gridlines on Screen box.

2. Design your poster by uploading a motivational photo of yourself or any photo you find inspirational. If you’ve completed a marathon or a college degree you’ve been working on for a long time, those are great inspirational photos that can inspire you to do more. Be sure the photo is at least 300 dpi so that it will print clearly.

3. Once you’ve designed your poster, save it as a Word or PowerPoint file. And then save it again as a PDF or JPG file. If you save it as a PDF, open the file back up to make sure everything saved correctly. Sometimes the conversion process chops off the edges of photos or overlaps text.

Making a Traditional Motivational Poster
If you want to copy the popular or traditional motivational poster look, just head to these Web sites.

1. Go to Big Huge Lab’s Motivator site at http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/motivator.php.

2. Upload a photo of your own, or browse for one at Flickr or Photobucket. You can also just type in the URL of the photo you want to use if it’s at another Web site.

3. You then choose how you want your photo cropped if it’s necessary, and you can choose between Landscape and Portrait orientation. You can also choose what kind of font you want and change the colors of the background and text. You can create a single line border, double line border or make it fancy.

4. You immediately get to see a preview of your poster so if you like how it looks, proceed to checkout. If you don’t, go back and change whatever you don’t like about it. I created one in about 1 minute.

5. Go to Order a Print. You can choose a size from 8 x 10 inches for $15 up to 20 x 24 inches for $40. Shipping is free, unless you need it in a hurry. Your order will be printed and shipped to you within 3 to 5 business days.