How to Create an InDesign Poster Template with Vector Backgrounds

So—we know you’re a go-getter and may not have the time to mock-up some killer design work every time you need creative marketing content. Lucky for all of us, easily customizable vectors, Adobe InDesign, and Illustrator exist.

Having a go-to InDesign poster template makes it a breeze to have coordinated and consistent marketing or promotional materials for all your needs. Maybe you want to promote an event for your business, recruit new talent to your company, showcase accomplishments, or you just want to educate and inspire the masses with your creative genius. Whatever it is, a poster template will help you get the word out.

After customizing the vector poster background to your liking in, Illustrator, open it up in Indesign to add specific text and tailor it uniquely for your needs.

Not quite sure how to get started? No worries! Pick one of our vector backgrounds from our library and follow along.

How To Create Your Poster Template Using Vectors

1. Start Adobe Illustrator and Open your vector template.

2. Essentially, we are creating the base for a poster that can be used over and over again for different things—so we just want to clean up what is currently on the vector so that we have a clean slate to customize in InDesign.

3. In Layers, open up the drop-down Groups to see what Path each element is. It helps to stay organized if you rename the Groups to what design elements they are. For example, the Group that contains all the individual Text Elements—rename Text.

4. Once you have determined what elements you’d like to clear off the vector, simply click the Eye icon next to that element to hide it from view, or click the small circle to the right of the element to group them and hit Delete.

5. Now go to File > Save As Template…so you always have the option to come back and revise your template in Illustrator.

6. Finally, go to File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy)… and choose the dimensions you’d like to export as. Remember to take into account if you’re designing for web or for print.

That’s it. Now you have a blank poster template to mock-up in InDesign.

Using Your Poster Template in InDesign

1. Create a new document in InDesign. Go to File > Place and grab your exported poster template.

2. Resize your poster to the document you created using the Click and Drag method. It’s time to start creating.

3. We used the Text Tool to make our heading—a bold, attention-grabbing statement, along with any other text we wanted to add. We also played around with the Ellipse Tool to make some fun text formatting in the middle of the poster.

4. After we got all our text situated, we used the EyeDropper Tool to create a Color Swatch of our poster. We picked two bright colors to use as accents in our heading and subheading.

5. Lastly, once we were happy with the way everything looked, we went up to File > Export > Export As…and gave it a name that was relevant to its purpose and saved it. Simple!

This is a very crisp and clean poster design—and we know that you have even more unlimited creative potential to make an even edgier, out-of-the-box poster design. Go grab some more vectors and whip up enough InDesign poster templates for every marketing opportunity.