Tree-Planting Poster: Hierarchy, Contrast and Sponsor Integrity
Students are designing an A2 poster (420 × 594 mm) for a council tree-planting day on a coastal reserve. The poster will be pasted on a bus shelter beside a 50 km/h road, and will also sit on a library counter. It must carry: a bilingual headline in te reo Māori and English, the date and start time, a QR code linking to registration, and four sponsor logos supplied as vector files, one of which is a square mark with a stated minimum size of 15 mm. A parent helper has produced a draft with the headline at 20 mm cap height, all six text blocks in the same weight and size, the QR code at 12 mm, and the logos stacked down the left edge at 15 mm each, stretched to 18 mm so they line up with the margin. The principal likes it because 'it looks tidy'.
1. Evaluate the draft against the two viewing distances and reprioritise the information.
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The draft is tidy but it is ordered for the library counter and fails at the bus shelter.
Distance check. A common signage rule of thumb is about 1 mm of cap height per 250 mm of viewing distance. At 30 m that means a cap height near 120 mm; at 5 m, about 20 mm. The draft's 20 mm headline is legible at roughly 5 m, so a driver at 50 km/h will register the colour and nothing else before they have passed.
Hierarchy rebuild. Only three or four words can carry a 100–120 mm headline on a 420 mm-wide sheet, so the headline must be cut to its shortest bilingual form and the English and te reo Māori given equal weight rather than one set small. Then: date and time second at around 30–40 mm; QR and a short call to action third; sponsor strip last.
The tidiness problem. Making all six text blocks the same size removes hierarchy – the reader has no entry point. Equal weight feels orderly to the designer and reads as a grey wall to a passer-by. Contrast in size and weight is what makes a poster work at distance.
2. Explain the faults in the QR code and the sponsor logos, and state the corrections.
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QR code. At 12 mm the module size is too small to scan reliably from a phone at arm's length, especially on a bus shelter that may be damp, curved or partly shaded. A practical print minimum is about 20 × 20 mm, with 25–30 mm safer. It also needs a quiet zone of about four modules of clear space on every side, dark modules on a light background, and no image or text behind it. Correction: enlarge to at least 25 mm, clear the quiet zone, raise the error-correction level to High, and test the printed proof with two phones at 300 mm and at one metre.
Logos. The 15 mm minimum has been respected, but stretching each mark from 15 mm to 18 mm distorts it, which breaks the sponsor's brand guidelines and is a professional and contractual issue, not a matter of taste. Correction: scale each logo proportionally, align them on a common baseline and optical size rather than a forced width, and group them as one sponsor strip with equal visual weight. Bumping a logo's size to make a layout tidy is the wrong trade: the layout should flex, not the supplied artwork.
3. Recommend a colour strategy that keeps the poster legible for colour-blind viewers and works in both locations.
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Roughly 8% of men have some red-green colour vision deficiency, so colour cannot be the only carrier of meaning.
Use value first. Build the poster on a dark-on-light or light-on-dark relationship with a strong value step between background and type. Check this by viewing the layout in greyscale: if the headline still separates from the background and the QR still reads, the design survives colour-blindness and also survives a photocopier, a laminated sheet and a dull day.
Avoid the risky pairings. Red text on green, or green on red, fails for the most common deficiency type. If the planting day needs a 'natural' palette, get it from a mid-green plus a warm ochre and separate them by lightness, not by hue alone.
Do not colour-code alone. If different sessions or sites are colour-coded, add an icon or a label. The QR code stays dark on white with no tint. Keep the sponsor strip neutral so no logo loses contrast against the poster background, and keep saturation low behind text so the type edge stays crisp at distance.