On the Most Noble Art and Science of Poster-Making

Late fall in Oberlin is always very rainy. I can’t count the number of times when, having gotten up at nine twenty in the morning for a nine thirty class, I’ve had to run out the door, completely forgetting to check the weather or bring an umbrella with me. It’s not really a problem, most of the time: Oberlin’s campus has plenty of places to hide from the weather. You can go through a long hallway in the Science Center to get to your classes near Wilder Bowl from the dorms on North Quad. You can hide from the rain by strategically walking beneath the trees in Tappan Square instead of sticking to the sidewalk. The resulting effect is that your shoes get wet, but your backpack (and your laptop, your workshop letters for class, your charging cord) stays dry.

One morning, recently, I was running from the rain. I needed to get from Wilder Hall, where I picked up some food for myself, to the library, but the weather had become truly torrential, and, not having an umbrella, I needed to find somewhere to hide out. I ended up huddling beneath a small wooden structure near the sidewalk, the existence of which I had never really noticed before. Standing there in the cold, I caught my breath and readjusted my food’s position in my arms. The roof over my head wasn’t that wide. I turned to face away from the rain, trying to shelter myself, and paused when I saw what the wooden structure was built to protect.

Posters. Posters of all sizes and shapes and colors. Posters on 8.5 by 11 glossy paper, 11 by 17 cardstock, legal size printer paper. Posters with QR codes and links and with those little incisions on the bottom so that you can rip off a piece of it with a little bit of information about whatever the poster is advertising, so that you can look it up when you get home. Posters from clubs and student organizations. Posters from the administration, from campus safety, from regional coalitions and committees of all types. Little rectangular pieces of paper with some deeply incomprehensible message on them, advertising an experimental music concert. Gigantic glossy posters – towering over the small ones, covering them up, like a tree in the rainforest reigns over the understory – advertising some semi-famous visiting folk musician. So many posters.

…At Oberlin, we love our posters. And what every Oberlin student realizes, upon first finding themselves needing to make a poster, is that poster-making is both an art and a science. The best posters resonate with something deep in the viewer’s mind; they evoke archetypes and atavisms to make their message known; they stick around in your brain like an annoyingly catchy song, long after you’ve walked away from the poster board in question.

I realized this a few weeks ago, incidentally the same day that I found myself huddling by the poster board near the library, when I personally found the need to make some posters. There was a composition department concert that I had a piece in, and the folks running the concert asked me to create a poster to advertise it. So, when I got to the library on that rainy day, I sat down with some food and tried to make a poster.

And my mind went blank. How, exactly, does one make a poster? How do you even start? You have to have some cool art, right? …How do you get cool art? It occurred to me then, plain as day, that I needed to make myself a true student of this school of poster-making. How else would I learn this noble art and science in time for the concert?

I quickly sought out my friend Max, who I knew to be a master poster maker. They design posters for our a cappella group, the Obertones, and I knew I could trust their judgment. I made a mockup of a possible poster design – the concert featured both electronic and classical music, and accordingly I thought that a public domain watercolor landscape painting fed through a glitch filter would make an appropriate image to use – and sent it over to Max. After a couple of rounds of prototyping, I had a workable design.

And then I encountered the other part of poster design, the truly difficult part. How do you pin up posters where people will see them? The poster boards on campus are a place of fierce competition. The savvy poster maker knows that mounting posters at eye level makes them more likely to be seen. For that reason, if one were to visit the Oberlin campus and take a look at any bulletin board, they would encounter a visual war of all against all, waged approximately five and a half feet off the ground. You can pin up your poster higher or lower than everyone else’s, but it will not be seen there. The best you can do is find a poster on a given bulletin board advertising an event that has already happened, and pin up your poster in a minimally obtrusive way.

My posters were printed on lanky eleven-by-seventeen glossy pages, which made them difficult to pin up. In some places, they had to be hung ungracefully in front of a matte of old posters. Such is the unforgiving art and science of poster-making and poster-posting. But when all was said and done, people did attend the concert. Thus I can only assume the posters were completely successful.

And it’s for this reason I find that poster-making can in fact be deeply rewarding. A few days after my first forays into the world of poster-making, I actually had to create another poster for a different concert, and this time, it was personal.

You see, this concert was a project of my own. In late 2023, I found myself listening to Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky (orchestrated by Ravel) over and over again, and eventually a thought crept into my mind. …What if I were to find a few Oberlin art students and composers and put on a combination concert-slash-art-exhibition? I couldn’t leave the idea be, and over the next ten months, I spent more waking moments than not putting that project together.

Soon enough I had to make a poster for it. And it was while I was making the poster that a feeling of deep nervousness seized me. Yes, we had spent two months rehearsing our music for the concert, and our composers and artists had spent many more months composing and art-ing. But once I made a poster and put it up around campus, then the concert was really going to happen. Then it would become real.

So I sidled my courage up, and composed a first draft. (I put cropped pictures of each of the artworks for the exhibition in frames, and put the information for the concert inside another, larger, frame.) After a few adjustments, I sent it off to the printers. When the prints came, I hung them up around campus and held my breath.

And on concert day, things went off more or less without a hitch. People showed up to the concert and stayed around for the exhibition. I had a lot of things to think about that day, but one of them was: I made a decent poster. This mysterious art and/or science of poster-making – I felt that I was finally picking it up.

Oberlin is a college full of people who really like doing things and like getting other people to come do things with them. This is my favorite thing about Oberlin. And this is why Oberlin is a college of poster-makers. You’ll see conservatory students making posters (ranging from the amusingly bizarre to the extraordinarily artistic) for their junior and senior recitals. Clubs advertise meetings with posters, performers advertise exhibitions or concerts or both, and some people make joke posters for events that don’t even exist. I’ve found living in this kind of community entirely exhilarating, and this semester has taught me to appreciate being in a position where I have to make a poster – because it means that I, too, have something that’s worth making a poster for.