Art & Design posters
LearnPosters has 100 free printable art & design posters, grouped into 7 topics: Drawing, Colour & composition, Typography, Art history, Digital design. The principles behind making things that look considered. They are made for undergraduates, professionals and anyone revising the subject. Every one downloads as a vector PDF that prints sharp on US Letter, A4 or a copy-shop A1.
Drawing, colour, composition, type and form — the fundamentals that transfer across every visual discipline, plus the history that explains them.
100 free printable posters · 7 topics · vector PDF
Drawing
Observation, construction, perspective and value.
Sight-Size Method
Measuring a subject at its apparent size, using a plumb line and a held pencil.
Blocking In
The straight-line envelope that settles proportion before any curve.
Negative Space
Drawing the gaps around a subject instead of the subject itself.
Gesture & Contour
Two ways of putting a line down, and what each of them is actually for.
Perspective Basics
Horizon, vanishing points and the cone of vision, in the order they matter.
Two-Point Perspective
Constructing a box seen at an angle, from two vanishing points on the horizon.
Three-Point Perspective
The third vanishing point, and why verticals start to converge.
Ellipses
Drawing a circle in perspective without the pointed ends that give it away.
Foreshortening
A form pointing towards you compresses in length but keeps its full width.
The Value Scale
Nine steps from white to black, and where each one belongs on a lit form.
Light on Form
The six things one light does to one solid, in the order you meet them.
Cast Shadows
Constructing where a shadow falls, from the light source and the object.
Edge Quality
Four kinds of edge, and what each one tells the eye about depth and focus.
Figure Proportions
The head-unit canon, and the warning that has to come with any canon.
Drawing Media
What each drawing material does, and the paper surface it needs to do it.
Colour & composition
Harmony, contrast, balance and hierarchy.
Hue, Value, Chroma
The three independent dimensions of colour, and which does most work.
Colour Schemes
The standard wheel relationships, and what each one actually buys you.
Additive & Subtractive
Mixing light and mixing pigment: different rules, different primaries.
Simultaneous Contrast
A colour changes appearance according to what surrounds it.
Warm & Cool
Warm and cool are relative judgements, not fixed properties of a hue.
Mixing Greys
Making a neutral from complements instead of reaching for a tube of black.
The Limited Palette
Fewer colours, mixed by you, give more harmony than a full box of tubes.
Colour Contrast
The contrast ratios that keep text legible, and the readers they exist for.
The Rule of Thirds
A useful default for placing a subject, and an honest account of its limits.
Focal Hierarchy
The devices that decide what a viewer looks at first, second and last.
Figure & Ground
Which shape the eye takes as the subject, and how to control that choice.
Balance
Symmetrical and asymmetrical balance, and the weights each handles.
Scale & Proportion
The proportional systems designers use, and what each is good for.
Notan
The two- or three-value pattern under a picture, judged before any detail.
Typography
Anatomy, spacing, pairing and setting.
Type Anatomy
The names for the parts of a letterform, and the lines they are built on.
Type Classification
The historical categories, their dates, and how to recognise each one by eye.
Kerning, Tracking, Leading
Three different spaces, three different controls, three different jobs.
Measure
How long a line of text should be, and what goes wrong either side of that.
The Type Scale
Sizing type by ratio, so a hierarchy holds across a whole document.
The Baseline Grid
Locking every line of text to one rhythm across columns, pages and spreads.
Typographic Hierarchy
The signals that rank text, and the rule about using as few as possible.
Pairing Typefaces
Choosing two faces that work together, and the reason most pairings fail.
Justified & Ragged
Setting text flush on both sides or ragged right, and what each one costs.
Widows & Orphans
The two bad line breaks, how to tell them apart, and how to fix them.
Optical Alignment
Why measured alignment looks wrong, and the adjustments that correct it.
Figures & Small Caps
The number and capital variants a professional face carries, and where each belongs.
Dashes & Quotes
The marks a keyboard hides, and the substitutes it hands you by mistake.
Legibility & Readability
Two questions: can the letter be told apart, is the text easy to read?
Art history
Movements, and what each was arguing against.
Impressionism
What the Impressionists were painting against, and what followed.
Post-Impressionism
Four painters who took Impressionist colour and put structure back into it.
Arts & Crafts
The revolt against industrial production, and the contradiction inside it.
Cubism
The break with single-viewpoint perspective, and its two phases.
Constructivism
Art remade as construction for a new society, and its design language.
Bauhaus
Fourteen years, three cities, and a teaching model still in use.
Surrealism
The unconscious as subject matter, and the methods invented for it.
Abstract Expressionism
New York in the 1940s and 50s, and the two very different halves of it.
Pop Art
Mass culture taken as subject matter, and what it was arguing against.
Minimalism
Work that refuses composition and metaphor, and the argument it drew.
Swiss Style
The International Typographic Style: grid, sans-serif, objectivity.
Postmodern Design
The revolt against the grid, its dates, and what it was actually arguing.
Ukiyo-e
Japanese woodblock printing, and what European painting borrowed.
Islamic Geometric Design
A geometric tradition built from compass and straightedge, with rules of its own.
West African Art
Court sculpture, casting and symbols, and how Europe misread them.
Digital design
Tools, formats, colour spaces and output.
RGB & CMYK
Two colour models, two gamuts, and the conversion that quietly loses colours.
Colour Profiles
What an ICC profile does, and why a file without one is undefined.
Raster & Vector
Pixels or paths: which one a job needs, and what neither of them can do.
Resolution for Print
How many pixels a print needs, at the distance it will be seen from.
Halftone & Screening
How continuous tone becomes ink dots, and where 300 ppi comes from.
Bleed & Trim
The three lines on every print layout, and what happens if artwork stops at the edge.
Image Formats
Which format to hand over, and what each one throws away on the way.
Compression
Lossy and lossless compression, and what a JPEG does to a hard edge.
Bezier Curves
How the pen tool actually works, and the habits that produce clean paths.
Non-Destructive Editing
Working so that every decision can be undone tomorrow, not only today.
Spot Colour & Overprint
Printing with a named ink instead of four, and the two traps that ruin it.
Paper & Finish
Weight, coating and grain, and how each changes the way ink sits.
Sending Files to Print
The checks that catch the errors a printer would otherwise catch for you.
Fonts & Licensing
The formats a typeface ships in, and what the licence lets you do.
Form & 3D
Volume, materials and making.
Form from Planes
Building volume out of flat planes before smoothing anything into a curve.
Modelling & Carving
Building up and cutting away are different disciplines with different risks.
Armatures
The internal skeleton that stops modelled work collapsing.
Clay & Firing
The states clay passes through, and what can still be done in each of them.
Moulds & Casting
The mould types, and which one a given form and material actually demands.
How Materials Behave
The properties that decide whether a material will do what you ask.
Working With Wood
Grain direction governs cutting, joining and how a piece moves after it is made.
Joining & Fixing
Mechanical, adhesive and thermal joints, and the loads each of them can carry.
Maquettes
Testing an idea small and fast before committing any material.
Tolerance & Fit
How much slack a joint needs, and why parts that measure right still will not fit.
Surface & Finish
The sanding and finishing sequence that actually removes the previous scratches.
Digital Fabrication
Laser, router and 3D print: what each makes well, and what it cannot.
Studio Safety
The hazards that really injure art students, and the control for each.
Mass & Void
The hole as a sculptural element, and what it does to a solid form.
Practice & portfolio
Critique, process and presenting work.
What a Crit Is For
What a critique is for, and the three questions it should answer.
Giving a Crit
How to say something useful about somebody else's work in three minutes.
Taking a Crit
How to get value out of feedback without defending or collapsing under it.
Sketchbook Practice
What a sketchbook is for, and what assessors are looking for in one.
Documenting Process
Capturing how a piece was made, while you are still making it.
Photographing Work
Getting a flat, true and sharp record of a piece using ordinary equipment.
Editing a Portfolio
Cutting a body of work down to the pieces that actually make the case.
Sequencing Work
The order pieces are seen in, and the shape a viewer actually needs.
Artist Statement
A short, plain account of what you make and why, with no art-speak in it.
The Artist CV
The conventional sections of an art CV, and the order they appear in.
Visual Research
Gathering references so that they inform the work rather than replace it.
Copyright & Credit
Who owns an image, what you may reuse, and how to credit a source properly.
Reading a Brief
Turning a client's request into a set of constraints you can design against.
Hanging a Show
Getting work onto a wall so it can be seen, using the conventions people expect.
Questions about the Art & Design posters
- What is the Art & Design section of LearnPosters?
- The principles behind making things that look considered. Drawing, colour, composition, type and form — the fundamentals that transfer across every visual discipline, plus the history that explains them.
- What topics do the Art & Design posters cover?
- 100 posters across 7 topics. Drawing — Observation, construction, perspective and value. Colour & composition — Harmony, contrast, balance and hierarchy. Typography — Anatomy, spacing, pairing and setting. Art history — Movements, and what each was arguing against. Digital design — Tools, formats, colour spaces and output. Form & 3D — Volume, materials and making. Practice & portfolio — Critique, process and presenting work.
- Who are the Art & Design posters for?
- The art & design charts are pitched at undergraduates and professionals — the frameworks and equations a course keeps returning to. Nothing here is tied to a school year, so a curious beginner and someone revising the same material for an exam are looking at the same art & design chart.
- Which Art & Design poster should I print first?
- Sight-Size Method, Blocking In and Negative Space are the ones people reach for first — they are the references the rest of the art & design set assumes you already have on the wall.Sight-Size MethodBlocking InNegative Space
- Are the Art & Design posters free to print?
- Yes — all 100 of them. Each art & design poster is a free vector PDF that needs no account, prints on US Letter or A4, and enlarges to A1 without softening. Home, classroom, library and tutoring use are all covered by the licence.Read the licence
Where the art & design charts come from
These posters summarise. When you need the full account — or the normative text a chart is compressing — start here.
- MoMA Learning — Museum of Modern Art. Movements, terms and works referenced on the art-history charts.
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — W3C. The contrast and legibility standard behind the colour and type sheets.