Creating a poster in Illustrator

On this page, you’ll learn how to create a poster in Adobe Illustrator, including creating a new file, adding images and text, and saving the finished poster as a PDF. These instructions were developed using Adobe Illustrator 2024, and should work as written in most recent versions of Illustrator.

NOTE: These instructions assume you’re familiar with Adobe Illustrator. If you haven’t worked with Illustrator before, it’s highly recommended that you review the content in the course Illustrator: The Basics before creating your poster.

Things to note about creating a poster in Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editing program that is often used for creating posters. Since the program’s focus is more on creating images instead of text layouts, putting together a poster in Illustrator can be a little tricky for someone who’s not used to working with the application. Following are some things you should be aware of when creating a poster in Illustrator:

• Illustrator’s main purpose is for creating graphics, so its text styling and editing options are not quite as robust as applications specifically designed for page layout, such as Adobe InDesign.
• Illustrator can import text from Microsoft Word documents — however, if you format the appearance of the text in your Word document using Microsoft Word, Illustrator will import that formatting as well, so it’s important to be aware of this when creating the poster’s text in Word.
• While text can be imported directly into Illustrator, placing the text can be a little tricky as you’ll need to manually create and link the text frames so text flows between them when the frames are resized.
• To ensure none of the poster content accidentally gets cut off, you’ll need to manually create page margins using guides to ensure there’s enough space between the content and the edge of the page. (A margin of at least 1/2 inch is recommended.)

Setting up the poster file

The first step in the process is to create a new file to build the poster in, and to ensure that the artboard is the correct size for your poster before you start adding content. You can set the artboard size as part of the new document creation process.

We now have an artboard that's the size of our poster. Before adding content to the poster, let’s set up the workspace to make it easier to align items on the page. This involves turning on the document grid and rulers.

Using guides to help with content layout

Guides can be used to accomplish a number of different tasks in Illustrator. For example, they can be used to indicate the poster’s margin, to break up the poster into different sections (such as the header area and content area), or to help align text boxes as you create columns of text. The following accordion contains steps for adding a guide to the artboard.

Adding content to the poster

Here, we’ll focus on two separate tasks: adding text and adding images.

Adding text

Text can be added to a poster in Illustrator using the Place command. You can place Microsoft Word documents, rich text files, and plain text files into an Illustrator document. Once you've selected the text file you want to place, you'll create text frames that will fill with the text of the selected file. The following video demonstrates how to place text in an Illustrator document, and step-by-step instructions for accomplishing this are in the accordion below the video.

Formatting text

To format your poster’s text, including changing the font, making text bold or italic, and adjusting the spacing between paragraphs, you’ll need to use the Character and Paragraph panels, as shown below:

The Character panel will let you change the font, font size, and other aspects of how your text looks. The Paragraph panel will let you change the spacing between paragraphs of text, how the paragraph is aligned, the indent spacing for your first line of text, and more. Both of these panels are accessible from the Window menu, in the Type group.

NOTE: If you see an overset text indicator at the bottom right corner of one of the text frames after adjusting the formatting of the text, follow steps f-i in the instructions for adding text to a poster using the Place command in the previous section.

Adding images

Adding images to a poster in Illustrator is also done using the Place command. Before placing an image, it's important to make sure that nothing is selected on the artboard. If anything is selected in your document, Illustrator will replace the selected item with the image you place into the document.

Additionally, it's important to remember that when adding images to your poster, don’t enlarge them after they’ve been placed — if they look too small once added to your poster, you may want to check and make sure they’re an appropriate size and resolution for your poster. If an image is too large, you can safely make it smaller using the Selection tool to resize the image. For more information on checking and changing an image's resolution, read the section Changing your image’s resolution on the page Gathering high quality images. 

The following video walks you through adding images to a poster in Illustrator, and the process demonstrated in the video is outlined in steps in the accordion below the video.

Wrapping text around an image

At times, you may want to wrap text around an image you’ve placed in your poster. You can wrap text around images in Illustrator — however, before wrapping text around an image, you’ll need to make sure the object is at the top of the object stacking order for your poster. Once you’ve done that, you can wrap text around the image.

NOTE: To learn more about object stacking order in Illustrator, read the section Arranging objects in Illustrator on the page Adding effects and gradients to shapes from the course Illustrator: The Basics.

The following accordion folds contain instructions for wrapping text around an image and adjusting the spacing between the text and image, if needed.

Preparing your poster for printing

Once you’ve completed your poster, you’ll want to make sure that it’s saved as a PDF. This ensures your poster will look exactly the way you want it to when it’s printed, and will package all of your images, fonts, and text into one file that can be opened and printed using any computer.

PDF is one of the default file types you can save a file as in Illustrator, so you can use the Save As command to save a copy of your poster as a PDF.

Once your poster is saved, it's ready for printing!