Posters Can Make a Digital Difference
You may have seen posters in a library or art gallery before - often large, colorful prints that are hung on the wall. They can be used to publicize new products, promote the arts, or simply create a pretty backdrop for your living room. But did you know that there’s a whole other world of cool posters out there?
On the surface these funky little things look like just another cartoonish icon in your web browser’s toolbar. But they’re actually a window into the world of multimedia. With this in mind, we’ve backed up a few steps and are taking a closer look at how they can be used to bring images, text and sound together.
Posters are really nothing more than rock-solid web graphics - which is one reason why they can easily be turned into web content. So rather than throwing them away when you get distracted by something else, you should think about ways that you can repurpose them for your current needs.
You may not have considered this before, but one very cool way to use posters on your site is by adding them to your blog posts. In a way this is similar to what you’d see in any modern art gallery. The artist carefully considers the look of their work and the way it will be displayed before they even begin. Now that you’re looking at things from this perspective, think about how you can use posters to show off your personality or enhance your message.
You might even want to start a collection of these cool graphics and keep them handy whenever the mood strikes. We know it sounds crazy, but that little collection will grow faster than you think! Before long you’ll have a nice little archive of some of the most creative visuals that were produced during your news browsing sessions.
For more ideas, check out some of the following sites:
1. Colourful Web Designs - This is a site with a huge collection of great looking graphics that you can use as inspiration. You can even download each graphic as a ready-to-go image on your own page.
2. Cool Pixels - A site filled with the coolest web graphics from around the world. But unlike most posters, these ones are designed specifically for the web which means they have animated elements and interactivity built in to give them a little extra pizzazz. They’re really fun to explore!
4. Adobe Illustrator Gallery - This is a collection of free templates that are available to anyone through Adobe’s online library.
5. Peacocks Online Gallery - This site has a great little collection of web graphics with an emphasis on clean, contemporary design. It’s sort of like walking through an art gallery and taking snapshots.
6. Web Design Art - Here you’ll find a huge collection of different styles and techniques for using this type of graphic for your website. You can even download many of them for free! Each one is labeled according to its format (e.g. Web Icon, Splash Screen), style (e.g. Vector, Pixel Art) and project (e.g. Flash, Web) so it’s a great place to get a good general idea of how you might use it for your own site.
7. Web & Print Design Gallery - As the name implies this is a collection of resources for print designers as well as web developers and those who want to translate the printed page into the web environment. This was put together by one of our favorite designers: John Bellshill . There’s even a QR code that you can scan from your phone or pretty much anything else to bring everything here in one handy location!
8. Posterscapes - This one isn’t really a simple image collection, but it’s a really cool place to get ideas from. You can type in keywords related to the poster that you’re looking for and see all the different ways it turned up on the web in relation to your search. If there’s anything you see here that you like, you can click on it to access the original source (as long as they haven’t been taken down already).
9. Web Design Gallery - This particular website collects all sorts of different graphic elements in one handy location. You can type in keywords related to the poster that you’re looking for and see all of the different ways it turned up on the web in relation to your search. If there’s anything you see here that you like, you can click on it to access the original source (as long as they haven’t been taken down already).
10. Mega Pixel - If you want to include a poster or other image as part of your project, this site allows you to convert anything into a fully functional HTML (or SVG) file so that anyone can download it and use it on almost any web platform.
11. The Graphics Fairy - This site has a huge collection of different graphical elements that you can use in your work. Each one is tagged to make it easy to find what you need.
12. Open Clipart Library - A great resource for graphics of all different kinds including posters, maps and emblems.
13. Free Desktop Patterns - This website allows you to create your own patterns by combining a series of images into a seamless one-click download or personalize existing patterns to fit your needs and then order custom printed wallpaper!
14. The Gallery at Zazzle - Not strictly comics, but a really cool place to find a whole variety of posters and other graphical elements that you can use on your own site. There are all kinds of things here and most are available as downloadable files, some with very unique backgrounds, others in more traditional formats.
15. ZeptoLab - The Gladiators poster was made to promote the new app “Sonic Dash” by developing a poster exactly like an old illustration from the 80’s, representing a runner character in the game. This project is featured on AIGA : American Illustration Tumblr . (Image Source : ZeptoLab Design)
16. L’Isle-Jourdain (ISSN : 20034365) - This is a collection of posters from an article on “The Art of Getting Exercise” which was published in L’Isle-Jourdain, both the daily paper and weekly magazine.
17. Métier [μέθερι] - This is a set of five posters designed by graphic designer Arnaud Tuffery for the webzine métier [μέθερι]. The objective was to show off some of the best graphic designs found on the internet during that week with pictures selected from tutorials, articles and portfolios.
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Conclusion
And that’s all for now! So there you have it, a whole collection of cool posters for all kinds of different use cases. If we missed something you think belongs here, feel free to let us know in the comments. We’re always looking for new ways to help designers like you! Just be sure to link back to this article if at all possible so we can keep our records updated.
Special thanks goes out to the team at Webdesigner Depot and SitesDesignArt who helped put this page together and make it possible as well as the sites who gave us permission to use their content here in this post.