You can create a poster as quickly as you can enter the elements. Once you have your photos and text ready, you can create a poster in as little as an hour. Often it takes longer since, even though most of the layout is automatic, creating a poster is still a creative experience; you need to consider how to best tell your story and what looks best.

Yes. Individuals and non-profit organizations such as schools and churches can enter discount code 'nonprofit' at check out for a 75% discount off the poster. The discount doesn't apply to the printing or shipping costs. Discounted posters show a "Discounted For Non-profit Use" message in the corner.

Timeline Posters should be displayed in a prominent place. We recommend a few options: - Mounting. You can have your poster dry mounted to a foam board for display on a wall or tripod at a craft store like Hobby Lobby or Michaels. We don't offer mounting as a service because shipping a mounted poster is expensive, and mounted posters' corners can be damaged in shipping. - Magnetic poster hangers. These have wooden or plastic bars with magnets that pinch the poster at the top and bottom. The top has a string that can hang over a nail or adhesive hook. You can buy them from us or online. Get one at least as wide as your poster. - Frame. You can get a full frame, but these may be expensive for a large poster.

A good rule of thumb is that a 24- by 36-inch poster (such a standard Arch D or ISO A1) can comfortably hold about 40 elements, and a 36- by 48-inch poster (such a standard Arch E or ISO A0) can hold about 70. We recommend that you make your poster plenty large. Trying to cram too many elements on a small poster will make it look crowded. And don't leave important events out just because they don't fit. Make your poster big enough to tell your story well.

You can specify custom poster sizes, so you can make it very large. Think through how you will display a large poster. We can print and ship posters that are 42 inches in their smallest dimension, and up to almost 60 feet in length, so a poster that is 42- by 72-inches isn't a problem for us. If you plan to get it printed yourself, your local print shop may only support 36 inches in the smallest dimension. You'll want to check first. You can change your poster size after you have added elements, so you can start small and grow the poster as needed.

Absolutely! Download the PDF file of your poster and link to it from your website. Browsers will display the poster just fine. But note that a Timeline Poster is designed to be displayed on a wall, not on a small computer or phone screen. If you show your poster in a browser like Edge or Chrome, you will have to zoom in and scroll around to see it all. Also, your browser won't show your poster at full resolution. Text and images may appear pixelated or grainy. The printed poster won't have these problems.

TimelinePosters.com shows you a large version of your poster, but there is a repeated "Unpaid Sample" watermark on the poster. Internet documents that are displayed in a browser can often be downloaded for free, so we watermark it. When you purchase the poster, the watermark will be removed.

This message will be removed when you pay for your poster.

If you choose to download your PDF, the price you pay is clearly marked. If you want us to print and ship your poster, we charge reasonable printing and shipping charges. There are no hidden fees.

Of course! Since you enter your own text, you can choose any language for your poster. Our website is currently English-only, but poster text can be any language.

At Timeline Posters, we hate spam email maybe even more than you do, if that's possible. We promise that we will never sell your email address or do anything with it that we wouldn't want done with our own email addresses. We need you to have an account with your email address so no one else can see your posters and in case there is a need to communicate something with you about your posters.

At Timeline Posters, we are happy to print your poster for you at a reasonable cost and ship it to you in the US, Canada, and Mexico, but there are reasons you might want to just download your poster as a PDF file and get it printed yourself. Shipping costs money and time, or maybe you live somewhere we can't yet ship to. You are welcome to just purchase the PDF of your poster and print it yourself.

If you download your poster as a PDF file, you will probably want to print it. Timeline Posters are designed to be printed on large-format printers such as plotters sold by Hewlett-Packard or Canon. These plotters can print on wide rolls of paper; typically they have widths of 36 inch (914 mm) or 42 inch (1067 mm). If you work fo a larger company, they may provide employees with access to print services with a plotter. Or, you can find a local print shop such as a UPS Store or FedEx Office Print & Ship Center.

If you choose a local print shop to print your Timeline Poster, be sure to request quality paper. They may offer to print your poster on plain paper because it is cheaper. Your poster will look OK on cheap paper, but you will be happier if you choose semi-gloss or satin photo paper or card stock paper with a weight of at least 200 grams per square meter.

Print shops typically charge between $7 and $10 USD per square foot to print a poster on high-quality paper. Low-quality paper may be $3 or $4 USD per square foot. So, a 2-foot by 3-foot poster has 6 square feet and should cost between $42 and $70 to print on high-quality paper. A 3-foot by 4-foot poster has 12 square feet and should cost between $96 and $120 to print. Ask your print shop how much they charge.

You can choose from pigmented ink or regular ink. Pigmented ink may be more expensive, but it resists fading better.

The timeline is the part of the poster that shows the months, years, or decades. The Timeline Posters intelligent drawing algorithms handle most of the timeline layout for you. When you create your first event element, a ten-year timeline will be added. Then, as you add more events, the timeline will grow as needed. If your events span 50 or more years, the timeline will change from showing a number for each year to showing a number for each decade.

Many of the fields can be left blank when creating posters or elements, including Start Date and End Date. You will usually want to just leave these fields blank, and the Timeline Posters intelligent drawing algorithms will select reasonable values. For example, leaving the start and end dates blank will cause dates to be automatically selected to fit all your events. You can override these default values, but beware that any events before your start date or after your end date will not be displayed on your poster.

We recommend that you enter all of your events, then enter infographics like logos and portraits. As you enter events, your poster will change a lot. If you create infographics first, every event you add may cause the poster to reformat, and that may make you want to reposition the infographics.

When you have enough events, the Timeline Posters intelligent drawing algorithms will break your timeline into two or more segments if your poster is tall enough. Each segment displays years or decades from left to right, and each lower segment starts one day after the previous segment ends. This feature allows for comfortable viewing of all the events on a poster. The poster requires one vertical foot per segment, so a 3-foot-tall poster can have three segments.

To allow room for portraits, logos, or other large infographics, you may want to leave some space before the first segment starts or the last segment ends. To do this, you can override the start date or end date of your poster. Set the start date to 10 or 20 years earlier than your first event, or the end date 10 or 20 years later than your last event. When the poster is drawn, space will be allocated on the timeline for these years, but if there are no events in those years, the timeline won't actually be drawn there. This should leave you lots of space for your infographics.

Yes. The Background Color field on poster's Properties page has a dropdown list and a color patch. The dropdown list lets you choose from one of the default background colors, which will then be displayed in the color patch. Or, you can click the color patch to display the color picker. The color picker lets you choose any color by clicking, or you can enter values in one of three formats: RGB, HSB, or hex format. There's also an eye dropper tool that lets you pick colors from any window on your computer screen, including images, logos, websites, documents, etc.

The Timeline Posters rendering algorithms usually prevent events from overlapping with other events, but you can still place infographics in locations that overlap events. In an event's advanced settings page, you can specify an event's Location to be either above or below its timeline. Using this feature should give you enough space for logos, portraits, or other needed infographics. Another alternative is to specify a start year or end year in a poster's advanced settings page. Adding a few years to the beginning or ending of a poster, where there are no events, may give you the room you need for even large infographics.

Events on a Timeline Poster need a precise date because precision is often very important, but it isn't always important. Sometimes you only know the month or year, or even just an approximate date. In that case, enter an approximate date, then in the Caption or Text you can explain that the date isn't exact by using words like, "Sometime in 1972…" or just, "In 1972…". If you want the event to attach at the middle of a year, set the Date to July 1 of that year.

At TimelinePosters.com we had to decide whether to be a really, really good history poster service, or whether to be a mediocre drawing service like all the others. We chose the first option. We choose the best place to draw your timeline segments so you don't have to. We choose the best place for each of your events so you don't have to. By not forcing you to make these detailed decisions, we greatly simplify the process of making a history poster. The flip-side of that approach is that we can't just let you drag your infographics where you want; instead, you enter the horizontal and vertical location on the poster. You may have to tweak that location a time or two, but we think you'll agree that we chose the best option for you.

You do have control over things like the default event width and font size, but consider this… Timeline Posters are designed to be displayed on a wall where people that walk by will be enticed to stop for a few minutes to learn about their history. By default, the events and font sizes are large enough to be comfortably viewed in this way. Using smaller event and font sizes allows more events to fit on your poster. If you increase the sizes, you won't fit as many events, so you'll have to make your poster bigger, which increases printing costs.

By default, the width of each event on your poster will be 1.75 inches (44 mm). The Default Event Width allows you to change this value. Don't change it until you read the question above. If you specify a width for individual events, that value will override this poster-wide value.

The height of each element is chosen automatically based on its width. Images retain their aspect ratio, and text is made tall enough to fit within the specified width.

You can specify a width for individual events. Making an event wider will make it larger. Also, you can change the font size for individual events from the default of 12 points.

You can specify the width of event and infographic elements. The default width is 1.75 inches (44 mm). This width can be overridden for individual elements or for all elements on a poster. We automatically make the elements tall enough to hold their text. If the element has an image, we set the image width and let the image height change to retain the aspect ratio.

Since element width and font size are fixed, if elements have lots of text, that text has to grow vertically. We recommend that you limit the amount of text in elements. Captions should be a short phrase, and element text should be limited to a short sentence.

You can specify an element's width, but its height will always be tall enough for for its image and text. This means that tall, skinny images may appear taller than expected when placed on the Timeline Poster. If so, you may want to crop the image's top or bottom. For simplicity, TimelinePosters.com doesn't provide image editing tools, but you can use any popular image editing software to change your image before adding it to the poster.

To make an image bigger, change the element width in Events > Event Options > Advanced Options.