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60+ Amazing Poster and Advertisment Tutorials
Everyone in the business world knows the importance of posters and ads in advertising for specific products. Posters are an integral part of advertising. An eye-catching, attractive poster that conveys a professional, compelling message about a product, service or event will invariably hold the user’s attention.
In this article, we have collected a mixture of Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials related to posters and advertisements. You will find some are intermediate and some are very advanced, but they’ll all give you a lot of direction with photo composition, illustration, coloring processing, typography techniques, pen tool tricks, shapes processing and much more.
Poster Tutorials
Creating an Old-Collage Effect Poster
This one’s a favorite because it helps you put images and text together really easily. In this tutorial, the artist puts together a poster that has a main photograph and a lot of text, giving it an old collage feel.
Create an Awesome Music Poster
A comprehensive step-by-step tutorial that shows you a variety of techniques to create a beautiful music poster!
Create an Event Poster with C4D and Photoshop – PSD Plus Tutorial
A very exciting tutorial: take a rendered scene, add props and then finalize it in Photoshop. Loads of great tips and techniques in this tutorial!
Create an Impactful Child Welfare Poster
This tutorial teaches you some important techniques for creating high-impact images. Follow the steps to create your own high-impact child welfare poster.
Create a Pulsing Poster with a Vinyl Record and Grunge Type
In this tutorial, the artist explains how to create a vinyl record with blends and opacity masks. He also creates some funky pulsing elements and grunge typography and combines it into a unique poster design.
PS Quickie! Your Own Crazy Movie Poster
A beautiful step-by-step tutorial on creating movie posters.
Creating a Grunge Rock Poster
In this tutorial, the artist shows you how to design a beautiful grunge rock poster!
How to Create an Ice-Cold Poster with 3-D Text
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to combine stock images and 3-D text in a cool poster. The artist uses an icy theme and colors it in his own style. You’ll see it’s not that hard to create a simple, appealing poster that uses text and imagery effectively.
Create a Mock-Retro Poster Concept
This tutorial teaches you how to design a mock-retro poster. Learn how to manipulate photos and achieve a grungy, textured look.
Gigposter Design the New Sex
This tutorial requires no drawing talent, so don’t trip, folks. You will, however, need Adobe Photoshop 7.0 or higher and Illustrator CS2 or higher.
Awesome Colorful Poster Tutorial
This tutorial shows you how to put really cool colors in your images. The artist creates a poster with a good mix of typography and strong colors. The mix of simple techniques and a lot of style brings your work to a new level. Follow the tutorial and have fun!.
War Movie Poster Effect
In this tutorial, the artist shows some simple but efficient techniques that will help you make great movie posters.
Create and Then Shatter a Grid, While Making a Typographic Poster
This is not a typical design. The artist “breaks the grid” in the hopes of achieving a dynamic and exciting layout. So, grab the usual tools of the trade, Photoshop and Illustrator, and follow these steps to create your own results.
Designing a Typographic Concept Poster
In this tutorial, the artist takes you through a few steps to show you how he created a poster design.
Awesome Snowboard Poster
Through this tutorial, the artist teaches you how to create this cool-looking poster design using some really simple techniques. You’ll learn how to use different types of brushes effectively and also stock images.
Create Powerball Effect for Movie Poster
An incredible step-by-step tutorial on creating a powerball effect for movie posters.
Creating A Retro Grunge Poster
In this tutorial, the artist creates a retro/grunge-style poster using the pen tool, some textures and playing with the text to make it look more retro.
Design a Sin City Style Poster
In this tutorial, the artist creates that Sin City effect in Photoshop, but using Illustrator to create the perspectives and text. He walk you through the process of creating the effect, but it’s always good to play around and test different settings on your own to see how it works.
Make an Inspiring Artistic Poster with Drawn Elements
In this tutorial, the artist creates drawn elements with design brushes, brings them into Photoshop and then merges them into a unique poster composition that feels hand-made, stylistically unified and personalized. The techniques here focus on creating an original artistic illustration.
Create a ’60s Psychedelic Style Concert Poster
Go through the steps of creating a retro 1960s psychedelic concert poster. This tutorial relies heavily on the warp tool but includes a few other techniques as well.
Create Sci-Fi Poster Art
Make art that’s out of this world with a clever use of blend modes and some of Photoshop’s lesser-known filters.
Create a Fun Halloween Vector Poster
In this tutorial, the artist goes over how to create a dark graveyard scene with bats and a glowing moon. Let’s get in the spooky holiday spirit and have some fun making this Halloween poster design.
Design a High-Impact Gig Poster Suitable for Screen Printing
In this one, the artist goes for a stylized and coarse effect, rather than a photo-realistic half-tone interpretation. This three-color design looks great on screen, printed from your home printer or screen-printed using the silk-screen printing method.
Create a Constructivist Inspired Poster
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a poster design inspired by the art movement known as Russian Constructivism. The artist cuts up some images and pastes them together to create a stylized revolution.
Dirty Grunge Poster
This tutorial shows you how to turn your images into a cool dirty-grunge design, which can be used for posters, prints, CD covers, etc.
How to Design a Rockin’ ’80s Party Poster
In this tutorial, the artist shows you how to design a poster for an ’80s anthem party. He will create some textures for the background, manipulate a photo to give it some style and make color variations.
B-Movie Poster Art
Prepare to shock! Terrify! Amaze! Mark Mayers demonstrates how to recreate the schlock B-movie posters from cinema’s golden age.
Create an Explosive Cover with Precise Photo Manipulation Techniques
In this tutorial, the artist does a creative illustration in the style of a video game cover or sci-fi book cover. He does this mostly with photo manipulation techniques. With some cool Photoshop tools, you can turn any of your photos into a stunning, explosive cover.
Design a Vintage Car Poster with Grunge Texture, Font and Brush Set in Photoshop
In this tutorial, the artist shows you the process involved in making an old-looking vintage-car poster with grunge textures and font and brush sets in Photoshop.
Create an Inspirational Vector Political Poster
This tutorial is inspired by Sheppard Fairey’s famous political poster series for the Obama campaign in the US. The artist shows you how to create this style of design. He starts with basic image-editing techniques in Photoshop to get the guide layers set up, and then he jumps into Illustrator.
Create a Trendy Typographic Poster Design
A step-by-step poster design for creative typography.
Design a Retro Summer Poster Illustration
This tutorial covers some really cool illustration techniques, exploring Photoshop’s vector capabilities and playing around with textures and selection methods.
Reader Tutorial: Create a Cool Movie Poster in Photoshop
In this tutorial, you learn a few good techniques and tips for color correction. Hopefully, this tutorial will benefit you in your pursuit of becoming a better designer.
Create a great retro-style movie poster
In this tutorial, Sakke Soini guides you step by step through the process of creating this cool old-school sci-fi poster, based on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
New PLUS Tutorial – How to Create a Horrific Zombie Poster with Photoshop and 3-D Renders
This is a wonderfully terrifying tutorial that uses multiple elements to bring together the final dark design. The most note-worthy elements are the 3-D renders of zombies from Poser. You’ll learn how to create “The Digital Dead” poster in a tutorial fitting for Halloween.
Create a Poster Illustration with Floating Floral Elements
In this tutorial, the artist creates an interesting poster-sized illustration with floral elements.
UBL Tuts Tutorial
A step-by-step Photoshop tutorial on making a retro poster.
Love Poster
This Adobe Photoshop CS3 tutorial shows you how to make a love-flavored poster.
WWII Airplane
In this tutorial, the artist uses the noise and blur filters to create a brushed-metal effect, and then adds a few layer styles to create a cool little airplane graphic.
Create a Retro Style Poster with Shapes, Patterns, and Eagles
Create a retro-style poster. Using the Pathfinder tools, learn how to create shapes by joining paths and applying graphic patterns. Also take advantage of the Appearance palette and have some fun applying multiple strokes to objects.
Meshing Boxing Gloves and Composing an Event Poster
Create realistic-looking boxing gloves with the mesh tool and integrate them into an event poster. The explanation here is in depth, and you should already have a good understanding of the mesh tool
Create a Dark and Grungy Poster in Photoshop
Make the very dark and grungy poster you see below. This tutorial focuses on blending images together to achieve the desired effect.
Stencil poster effects in Photoshop
Digital artist Ian Keltie shows how to combine elements in Photoshop and create a poster with stencilled art to promote your message.
X-Men movie poster
In this tutorial, the artist shows you some cool tricks to do some awesome custom wallpaper and movie posters.
Earth Day. Green Planet
Learn how to create a beautiful Earth Day, green planet poster in Photoshop.
Lord Of The Rings Poster
An interesting and detailed tutorial on the Lord of the Rings poster
Step Up 2 Poster
Make this poster in the style of Step Up 2.
Create Fantastic Abstract Poster Effects
Make your mark with strong but simple shapes and bold read-my-lips colors. Danilo Rodrigues shows you how.
Poster From the Words
Want to make your own cool musical poster? This artist teaches you how.
Create a Pop-Art-Style Poster with Urban City Background in Photoshop
In this tutorial, the artist shows you the process he used to create this pop-art-style poster with an urban city background, using a combination of Photoshop filter effects.
Advertisement Tutorials
Perform Laser Eye Surgery on a Photo with Photoshop
Create an advertisement about LASIK laser eye surgery. In this Photoshop tutorial, you’ll manipulate a photo of an eye to create a LASIK flap and learn techniques for drawing transparent objects.
Create An Amazing Diamond Advertisement Poster in Photoshop
In this tutorial, you will learn a few techniques that might be very useful to you and give you some great ideas when you create your own advertisements.
Creating a Shoe Advertisement Poster Using Floral Elements
Create an advertisement poster for your own shoes. When working on an advertisement, you must pay attention to all of the details that the whole world will see.
Designing a Portable Gaming Device Poster
In this intermediate-level Photoshop tutorial, the artist walks through making a creative advertisement poster.
Fragmented Golden Phone
A very detailed step-by-step tutorial.
Perfume Commercial Poster
This tutorial teaches you how to make your very own fragrance advertisements. Even though Monica Bellucci is used, you can turn any ordinary home-made picture into a fragrance advertisement billboard.
Photoshop tutorial – G900
The artist here makes it as easy as possible to understand every step of this tutorial.
Designing a Portable Gaming Device Poster
In this intermediate-level Photoshop tutorial, the artist makes an interesting advertisement poster, which he says would be great for advertising your newest product or just getting some design practice.
Make a Turn-of-the-Century Vaudeville Poster
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how create a turn-of-the-century vaudeville poster. This unique and appealing style of advertisement was popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Design a Professional Laptop Advert
This artist teaches you how to manually create your own vanishing points and how to use the technique to create an awesome screen explosion effect, something sure to dazzle your viewers!
Color Effects to Create a Stunning Print Advertisement
In this tutorial, you’ll create a stunning print advertisement.
Professional Advertisement Poster
This new tutorial shows you how to make a professional advertisement poster, based on color contrast.
Create an Amazing Ad in Photoshop
Use some images and play with the blend and color adjustment modes to create a really cool Nike ad in Photoshop.
Photoshop Tutorial: Sweet Radio Station Advert Design
In this tutorial, the artist uses Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop (version CS3) to create a beautiful radio station advertisement. He uses Illustrator to design just a few simple elements.
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Aquil Akhter is doing his job as a web graphic designer and working in this field since 8 years. He also runs the blog webdesigncore.com, which focuses on free web resources and inspiration especially for designers and developers.
- 66 Comments
- 1
- 2June 1st, 2009 4:41 am
Fantastic collection with amazing designs.
Where do you get all this input from?Genius. Stay tuned for more happy days.
- 3June 1st, 2009 4:49 am
Liking it, some inspiration in there. Thanks
- 4June 1st, 2009 4:53 am
Thanks for good collection
- 5June 1st, 2009 5:01 am
This is a huge and beautiful list. Thanks for including my tuts!
- 6June 1st, 2009 5:21 am
Great collection. On the War movie poster, shouldn’t it be spellbinding, not spellbiding?
- 7June 1st, 2009 5:21 am
Nice Resource… Appreciate your effort… it’s a very refined collection of some of the best poster tutorials around !! Thanks for sharing.
DKumar M.
@instantshift - 8June 1st, 2009 5:24 am
very good list…
- 9June 1st, 2009 5:25 am
Great collection ! and many inspirations too ! thanks
- 10June 1st, 2009 6:47 am
Fragmented Golden Phone is the best! Excellent idea and implementation!!
- 11June 1st, 2009 6:59 am
Very very cool, keep it up
- 12June 1st, 2009 7:02 am
Some ok tutorials however alot of them are very disappointing, but if you learn one new technique then its a good post.
- 13June 1st, 2009 7:59 am
Great collection
- 14June 1st, 2009 8:42 am
Great selection, some top ideas to try, thanks Smashing Mag !!
- 15June 1st, 2009 9:05 am
a bit crappy, but some posters are nice (and again: very much “post recycling”…)
- 16June 1st, 2009 9:18 am
Awesome collection, thanks for sharing! :)
- 17June 1st, 2009 10:34 am
99% of what you posted sucks.
- 18June 1st, 2009 11:10 am
Wow, Impressive and revealing, great list! Poster making is something I really want to learn, so thanks for the tutorials..
- 19June 1st, 2009 11:12 am
List is mind blowing to say the least, could keep me busy for weeks checking all these out! Thank you kindly…
- 20June 1st, 2009 11:35 am
Why you never make the same tutorials with GIMP ?
- 21June 1st, 2009 11:43 am
nice collection…very usefull, thenxxxxx….
- 22June 1st, 2009 12:32 pm
It must be really hard to find new and interesting tutorials.
- 23June 1st, 2009 12:39 pm
All of these are amateurish, derivative, and uninspired.
- 24June 1st, 2009 1:01 pm
great post again. very usefull. 10x a lot :)
- 25June 1st, 2009 1:49 pm
Don’t they are amazing. Good samples maybe :)
- 26June 1st, 2009 2:37 pm
Awesome post; makes me want to layout some posters!
- 27June 1st, 2009 3:05 pm
once again, some of them are NOT on a smashing-mag-level
- 28June 1st, 2009 9:15 pm
Great collection you put together here, awesome list. I knew few of them but not all. Thanks for listing out.
- 29June 1st, 2009 10:06 pm
great collection, keep it……
- 30June 1st, 2009 11:39 pm
wtf? speckyboy did this exact same post. today.
http://speckyboy.com/2009/06/01/37-cool-movie-poster-and-text-effects-photoshop-tutorials/
see?
- 31June 2nd, 2009 12:16 am
What an excellent collection. Thank you!
- 32June 2nd, 2009 12:25 am
Thomas – they are all above your level tho, so get your head down and learn some class
- 33June 2nd, 2009 12:46 am
All of these are horrible!!, i mean come on!!: http://media.smashingmagazine.com/images/poster-advertisement-tutorials/3.jpg WTF?!
- 34June 2nd, 2009 12:49 am
Verp impressive collection. Thanks for sharing.
- 35June 2nd, 2009 12:51 am
Nothing Amazing about these sadly, moving along…
- 36June 2nd, 2009 1:02 am
smashing mag is the best
- 37June 2nd, 2009 3:24 am
This is what im lookin for. Cool. Thx SM
- 38June 2nd, 2009 4:12 am
Heya, just to let you know, you repeated your PSP poster, it appeared twice in the same post. :)
- 39June 2nd, 2009 4:42 am
I liked most of them
- 40June 2nd, 2009 9:49 am
i think maybe SM should have cut it down to the top 15 or so. i’ve seen many of these before. and some of them aren’t good. although there were some stand outs: abduzeedo’s sexy colors poster, the alphabet typography poster (with the typewriter), and the screen printing gig poster to name a few.
- 41June 2nd, 2009 11:22 am
Bullshit.
- 42June 2nd, 2009 7:35 pm
What an overwhelming number of mediocre designs. Most of which seem to have been designed for *tus (e.g. psdtuts).
- 43June 2nd, 2009 11:42 pm
this lazy loader thing sucks, comon!
- 44June 3rd, 2009 12:29 am
Cool posters..I love that’s
- 45June 3rd, 2009 6:21 am
Brilliant! :]
- 46June 3rd, 2009 7:26 am
respectfully I don’t think this posters tutorials are amazing.
Actually, most of them look like they were not made by a graphic designer.
They are just formulas to impress beginners with textures, reflections, splash and splatters….. - 47June 3rd, 2009 2:33 pm
Not impressive at all, only a few gems in this bunch. Almost all are overdone and typographically insulting.
- 48June 3rd, 2009 3:49 pm
I’m going to be doing a poster soon. Perfect timing and a good source of inspiration! Thanks!
- 49June 3rd, 2009 5:06 pm
Woah! Nice! tooo much tutorials here. my head will explode. :P
Thanks! - 50June 3rd, 2009 9:16 pm
this is amazin’! inspiration 4 the soul
- 51June 3rd, 2009 9:56 pm
Granted, Photoshop pros or those with a fair amount of skill in using the software may find some of these tutorials a bit naive or plain boring. However, for many, I’m sure, these tutorials can be an excellent means to learn the ropes and get to know about unleashing the true power of Photoshop. And that’s where the value of such posts really lie.
- 52June 4th, 2009 4:30 am
Thanks for featuring!! :)
- 53June 4th, 2009 5:49 am
Wow this is a great list! Some are better than others, but overall this is quite a list.
Check out my poster tutorial at Denis Designs!
- 54June 4th, 2009 11:37 am
I work in advertising and seriously, none of these ad tutorials would of made the cut. they are unprofessional, and too engrossed with eyecandy and photoshop brushes for any client to approve.
- 55June 4th, 2009 10:36 pm
I see the “Designing a Portable Gaming Device Poster” twice in your list.
Why are you giving the photoshoplady extra love ?
Love is in the air ?BTW, nice collection SM.
To all the people with negative remarks, especially #41 by Peter, keep at it.
I heard SM are collecting all your negative remarks with names to make a “Virtual Insanity” poster out of it. - 56June 5th, 2009 12:59 am
great collecction :)
thanks for sharing! - 57June 7th, 2009 12:07 am
awsome Collection !!!!!!!!!!!!
- 58June 12th, 2009 9:56 am
I would like to see a war movie with Christian Bale & Steve Zahn.
- 59June 23rd, 2009 8:13 pm
exelente galeria de tutorialeS!
- 60July 6th, 2009 4:37 am
nice collection, although some of them are a bit overdone and crappy as well
- 61August 15th, 2009 6:58 pm
the advertisement section was a major disappointment.
- 62August 23rd, 2009 1:08 am
maestroooooo…esta buenisimo
- 63August 23rd, 2009 10:23 pm
Superb wonder full collection.
Thanks
- 64September 12th, 2009 10:32 am
Great collection of some of the best poster tutorials on the internet.
- 65October 26th, 2009 4:08 am
Thanks for sharing this
This is excellent :)
- 66October 27th, 2009 12:16 am
bagus2 banget bro!
- 00
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Crazy selection! Thank you very much!