Vintage Bus Scroll Inspired Poster

I'm sure you've seen these vintage bus scrolls as part of interiors lately. They make such a fun graphic statement. Since the originals are hard to come by, I thought it'd be fun to make a version for our house. I decided to use all the street names where my husband and I  have lived since we've been married. But, just think of the possibilities. You could do favorite vacation spots, cities you visited, cities from your family history, a list of goals... whatever you can imagine. The picture above is found from a Flickr photo stream found [Here].

The ingredient list for this recipe is really simple. You will need:

• A boldish sans-serif font (I used Bebas- found on Font Squirrel for Free)
• A two color palette- Black & White or Light Grey.

 

First check out how you will be printing your poster. There are a lot of options when it comes to one at a time poster printing. Try Zazzle, CafePress, Overnight Prints, Uprinting, etc. They all have options for single poster prints. Look at their size & price options and decide which one you want to use.

Open a new document in your image editor to the size you want your poster. I used Illustrator and created my poster at 16x20 inches. You could use pretty much any editing program for this project and make it any size.

Fill the background of your document with black. Then created a smaller text box about 2 inches inside the border because I plan on framing my poster and want a little space to show around the words after it's framed.  Select full justified text and start adding your street names in white or light grey to the inside of the text box. I just listed each street on it's own line.

Find your text attribute option box in your program. In Illustrator it's found on your upper menu in a little blue link when you have your text tool selected. On the bus scroll example image you can see that some of the lines are really small, some are large, some are close together, and some spread way apart. This is done in the text options by playing with the font size, kerning, and tracking options. Just play around with them till you get all the streets on their own line and taking up the same amount of space on the line.

Alternately,  you could create a text box for each text line and then space them yourself. I've seen some bus scrolls with centered text of different sizes and it still looks cool. So, if that's easier for you with your available program, go for it. 

Follow the uploading directions of the printer you selected and save your new poster in their recommended formats.  Upload to your printer and when you get it back you'll have a great personal statement art piece to frame and hang.

Here's how mine turned out. I love it! I can't wait to get it framed and hang it up. We've been married for 14 years and if you've counted them up, moved 9 times. Fun to remember all the crazy places we've been together!

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I love design, illustration, crafts, & searching for cool vintage things in thrift stores. Find me blogging at The Modern Hive.