QUICK TIP
The purpose of a travel poster is to grab the
attention of a possibly busy commuter or
someone flicking through a magazine, and
transmit a short burst of information swiftly.
Text should be minimal and the design should
clearly show what is on offer. Here, it’s an area
of wild countryside, a common motif in vintage
London Transport posters.17
ADDING TEXT
A few lines of minimal text are common on retro travel posters. Usually one or two fonts are used,
perhaps with several changes in font size. Use bright, bold text to advertise the location, with smaller text
making some description of the place, or making some sort of joke – ‘Skegness, it’s so bracing’ is a famous
example. Here the Gill Sans font is used, heavily employed in the mid-20th Century. A free version by
Jonathan Paterson is available here: http://www.fontspace.com/jonathan-paterson/london-tube. After
adding text, look again at design and make any further touch-ups.18
AGE THE PAPER
The design is finished, but to give the design
a more retro look you can now age the paper.
Download a paper texture from the internet (‘Paper_
texture_v5’ from bashcorpo.deviantart.com used
here). Resize this to match the poster size and
import as the top layer in your poster stack. Next,
Ctrl/right-click on the layer and select Blending
Options. Experiment with blend modes and opacities- Multiply is often satisfactory; here Linear Burn is
used. Any unwanted texture areas can be selected
with the Marquee tool and Edit>Fill with Content-
Aware and 100% Opacity selected.
VINTAGE STYLE TRAVEL POSTER