Poster trade sizes, processes and papers, by period

① The one-line version

A poster is a trade size printed by a named process on a named paper, and pasted somewhere. Get the size right and the rest follows; get it wrong and no amount of ageing will save it, because the wrong size is visible before the audience has read a word.

② The trade sizes, and where they come from

These are real formats a printer would quote. They are not arbitrary: each comes from a press bed, a poster site or a frame that already existed.

Cinema

Format	Size	Notes
US one-sheet	686 × 1016 mm · 27 × 40 in	The modern standard.
US one-sheet, pre-1985	686 × 1041 mm · 27 × 41 in	An inch taller, and folded in eighths for shipping — the fold pattern is itself a dating detail.
US half-sheet	711 × 559 mm · 22 × 28 in	Landscape, lobby use.
US insert	356 × 914 mm · 14 × 36 in	The tall one.
US window card	356 × 559 mm · 14 × 22 in	Blank band at the top for the local playdates to be written in.
US lobby card	356 × 279 mm · 11 × 14 in	Landscape, issued in sets of eight.
UK quad	1016 × 762 mm · 40 × 30 in	Landscape — the British cinema format, and the reason British campaigns are composed sideways.
UK double crown	508 × 762 mm · 20 × 30 in	The rep-house and gig size.
Italian locandina	330 × 700 mm	Tall and narrow, for the bar window.
Italian photobusta	680 × 470 mm	Landscape.
French moyenne	600 × 800 mm	The half of the grande.
Japanese B2	515 × 728 mm	The standard Japanese film size — JIS B, not ISO B.
Australian daybill	330 × 762 mm	13 × 30 in.

Wall, gallery and street

Format	Size	Notes
Maxi	610 × 915 mm	61 × 91.5 cm — the poster-shop standard for a bedroom wall.
Door poster	530 × 1580 mm	The tall one that goes on the back of the door.
Magazine pull-out	420 × 594 mm	A2 folded down to A4 — creases and all, and the creases are the point.
ISO A0–A6	841 × 1189 down to 105 × 148	A1 and A2 for exhibitions and information, A3 and A4 for the photocopier notice, A5 and A6 for handbills and flyers.

Period gating. ISO A sizes come from DIN 476 in 1922 and are not the everyday format outside German-speaking Europe until after the war. A British 1930s notice is more likely to be a crown or double-crown sheet than an A2.

③ The process, and the artefact it leaves

The method is the period. Each one leaves something specific on the sheet, and a prop that has the right layout on the wrong process reads as a reproduction.

Method	In use	What it leaves
Stone litho	1800–1960	Flat spot colours, crayon grain, a hair of mis-fit between stones. Up to five workable inks.
Letterpress	1450–1975	Wood and metal type with a 0.1–0.3 mm bite into the sheet and ink haloing at the letter edges. Two or three inks. The showbill and the playbill.
Offset litho	1955–	Four colour, a 133–175 lpi rosette and 12–20 % dot gain. The default for anything commercial after the mid-fifties.
Rotogravure	1930–1998	Soft type edges and a visible screen texture in the solids — the magazine pull-out.
Screenprint	1930–	Ink sitting on the paper rather than in it, registration slivers, a coarse dot. The gig poster and the art edition.
Riso	1986–	Roller streaks, ±1 mm drift, two inks overlapping into a third. Unmistakably late-eighties onward.
Photocopy	1960–	Midtones gone, a platen border, and furring that gets worse with each generation. The punk flyer and the missing-cat notice.
Large-format inkjet	2000–	Dither noise, no rosette, dead-flat black. Distress it or it reads modern — and on camera it reads modern anyway.

Paper

Stock	Why it matters
Newsprint 55 gsm	Yellows fast. The only honest ground for a period bill — and the reason period bills survive so badly.
Noticeboard bond 100 gsm	Uncoated office paper; ages better than anything else on this list.
Copier white 80 gsm	The photocopied flyer.
Fluorescent flyer 80 gsm	Pink, yellow or green. Punk and hardcore, and a dye that did not exist before the 1960s.
Coated matte 200 gsm	The set standard. Matte — gloss mirrors an 18K and the gaffer will hate you.
Cotton rag 300 gsm	Deckle or torn edge. Art editions.
Kraft 120 gsm · canary tint 90 gsm	The film-society sheet and the works notice.

④ Eleven kinds of poster, and what each one is for

Category	Periods it is plausible in
Cinema — one-sheets, quads, inserts, lobby cards, festival and rep bills	1930s to now
Gig & club — dance-hall sheets, punk photocopies, rave flyers, screenprinted gig posters	1960s to now
Teen wall — invented bands, sports, pin-ups, motivational prints, game and idol sheets	1970s to now
Living space — Scandinavian minimal, botanical plates, line figures, mid-century geometry, quote prints	1950s–70s, then 2000s to now
Art & exhibition — gallery and museum bills, Swiss grids, Bauhaus geometry, biennale mastheads	1920s to now
Travel & transit — destination plates, railway and airline bills, underground panels	1920s–70s, and a 2010s revival
Public information — health, fire, workplace and transit notices	1940s to now
Regime & propaganda — recruitment, home front, compliance, curfew	1910s onward; a genre and a period at once
Notice board — missing person, lost pet, tear-off tabs, room to let	1960s to now
Show bill — circus, carnival, fairground, wrestling, rodeo, theatre playbills	1880s to the 1990s
Campaign & protest — election bills, strike sheets, referendum and activist print	1930s to now

The tear-off tab is a design problem, not a decoration. The tabs have to be the same width, the slits have to stop short of the body text, and the phone number has to read upside down on a tab that has been pulled and pocketed. If the sheet is a notice-board prop, an actor will pull one; make one that comes away cleanly.

⑤ Typography, and the one rule people break

Blackletter is never set in capitals

Fraktur and its relatives have no capital forms in the sense a Latin face does: setting a word in all caps produces letters that a German reader of any period would find illegible and that no compositor would have set. In the studio a style or a layout that asks for capitals gets them for every face except the blackletter ones. It is worth knowing because it is the single most common mistake in an invented German poster — and see also the newspaper page: the Normalschrifterlass of 3 January 1941 abolished Fraktur in the press altogether.

Greek before 1982 is polytonic

The same rule as the newspapers: δασείες, ψιλές and περισπωμένες until 12 January 1982. On a poster this bites hardest in the body text, because the display line is usually capitals and capitals carry no accent.

The faces have dates too

A geometric sans is a 1920s idea; a grotesque grid is Swiss and post-war; a phototypesetting face with tight, kerned display setting is late sixties at the earliest, because hot metal could not set letters that close. The safest approach for a prop is to pick the process first, then a face the process could hold.

⑥ What dates a poster fastest

The size. A 27 × 41 in one-sheet is pre-1985; a 27 × 40 is after. A British campaign on a portrait sheet rather than a quad is suspicious before the 1990s.
The fold. American one-sheets shipped folded in eighths until the 1980s; a flat, rolled 1950s sheet is a reprint.
The screen. No rosette before offset; a coarse hand-cut screen on a screenprint; no screen at all on a stone litho.
The colour count. Five flat colours says stone; four-colour process with a rosette says offset, 1955 at the earliest.
The paper. Fluorescent stock is not available before the sixties. Coated matte on a Victorian playbill is wrong twice.
The tagline furniture. Certification marks, running times, web addresses and social handles all have their own first dates — a URL on a poster is 1995 and later.

⑦ The certificate dates a film poster to the decade

Every country’s classification mark changed its wording two or three times in the twentieth century, and each change is a hard boundary. A single line of small type at the foot of a one-sheet will date it more precisely than anything else on the sheet.

Country	Years	What the poster said
France	to 1960	VISA MINISTÉRIEL · INTERDIT AUX MOINS DE 16 ANS
	1961–89	TOUS PUBLICS · INTERDIT AUX MOINS DE 13 ANS, and from 1975 INTERDIT AUX MOINS DE 18 ANS
	1990 on	The short forms: TP · -12 · -16 · -18
Germany	to 1948	JUGENDFREI · JUGENDVERBOT
	1949–56	FREIGEGEBEN AB 6 / AB 16 / AB 18
	1957 on	FSK 6 / 12 / 16 / 18 — the mark everyone recognises, and wrong before 1957.
Italy	to 1961	PER TUTTI · VIETATO AI MINORI DI 16 ANNI
Italy	1962 on	PER TUTTI · V.M. 14 · V.M. 18
Spain	to 1976	TODOS LOS PÚBLICOS · MAYORES DE 14 AÑOS · MAYORES DE 18 AÑOS — spelled out, which is the Franco-era form.
	1977–82	TP · +14 · +18
	1983–2009	TP · +7 · +13 · +18
	2010 on	TP · +7 · +12 · +16 · +18
Greece	to 1989	ΚΑΤΑΛΛΗΛΟΝ · ΑΚΑΤΑΛΛΗΛΟΝ ΔΙ’ ΑΝΗΛΙΚΟΥΣ — katharevousa, and the neuter -ον ending is the tell.
	1990–2011	ΚΑΤΑΛΛΗΛΗ · ΚΑΤΑΛΛΗΛΗ ΑΝΩ ΤΩΝ 13 — demotic now, and the ending has changed with it.
	2012 on	Κ · Κ-12 · Κ-15 · Κ-18

⑧ The price on the bill, and the currency underneath it

A poster that names a price names a currency, and the currency is a date in five of the six markets. All of them go to the euro on 1 January 2002; before that each has its own history, and two of them have a redenomination inside it that catches people out.

France. Anciens francs to the end of 1959 — large numbers, rounded to the nearest ten or fifty. The nouveau franc knocked two noughts off on 1 January 1960 and was written NF on printed matter until about 1963, after which it is plain F again. A 1961 poster priced in F rather than NF is the kind of thing a French viewer of a certain age notices.
Germany. RM to 1948 and DM after, with the currency reform of June 1948 between them. Prices are written with a decimal comma and a dash for the empty pfennigs: DM 4,–.
Italy. Lire, always whole numbers, rounded to the nearest five, fifty or five hundred as the figure grows. An Italian price with a decimal in it is wrong.
Spain. Pesetas, abbreviated ptas., whole above ten and in quarters below.
Greece. δρχ. to the end of 2001, in round numbers — tens above a hundred, fifties above a thousand, which is how prices were actually printed.

⑨ A Greek poster before 1982 is set in a different script

Greek has two reforms and they are not the same reform, which is the commonest mistake made about Greek period printing.

23 November 1981, given legal effect by Π.Δ. 297/1982 — the monotonic decision. Breathings and the iota subscript go; the circumflex and the grave become the acute; a one-syllable word loses its accent altogether. The words do not change, so a 1982 poster is katharevousa written monotonically.
Ν. 1406/1983 — demotic enters official use. Only now does Εφημερίς become Εφημερίδα.

So a Greek sheet before 1982 carries breathings and three accents, and the studio puts them back by rule: every initial vowel takes a breathing, smooth by default and rough on υ- and ρ-; the acute becomes a circumflex where the old rules leave no choice — a genitive -ών, a -ού, a contracted verb’s -ώ, a long penult over a short ultima; and a final acute becomes a grave before another word. Capitals are left alone, because a line in capitals carried no diacritics then or now.

Which is the other Greek rule worth knowing, and it applies in every year: a Greek word set in capitals loses its accent. Always. The diaeresis stays, because it is not an accent — it says the two vowels are read apart — and a tonos on the first vowel of what would otherwise be a digraph becomes a diaeresis on the second. Mάιος is ΜΑϊΟΣ, never ΜΑΙΟΣ, because ΑΙ without it is read as one sound and the accent was the only thing saying so.

⑩ Portugal, the Netherlands, Turkey and Russia

Four markets added in September 2026. Two limits hold in every studio: Turkey starts in 1928, the year the Latin alphabet replaced the Arabic script (an earlier Turkish sheet would be Ottoman, which no studio sets), and Russian before 1918 is spelled by rule — the hard sign on every word ending in a consonant and і before a vowel are placed automatically; the yat (ѣ) cannot be derived from modern spelling and is left as е. Turkish capitals keep their dots: i goes to İ and ı to I, so İSTANBUL, never ISTANBUL.

Country	What the studio changes, and when
Portugal	Copy in Portuguese, the telephone word by year (Telephone before 1911 is right), money in escudos with the cifrão.
Netherlands	Dutch copy, guilders to 2001.
Turkey	From 1928. Turkish capitals keep their dots (İZMİR, BİR SİNEMA); lira to ₺ in 2012.
Russia	Cyrillic pairs of their own — the old poster face, the grand serif, the constructivist grotesque, the column face and the hand-drawn letter — and any Latin face without Cyrillic falls back to a matched stand-in rather than the browser default. Slugs and file names are transliterated.

⑪ Sources

Formats · trade sheet sizes as quoted by cinema print houses (one-sheet, insert, window and lobby card; UK quad and double crown; locandina and photobusta; moyenne; JIS B2; daybill) · DIN 476 (1922) for the ISO A series
Process · standard lithographic and screen practice; offset screen rulings 133–175 lpi; Riso duplicator from 1986; xerography in office use from 1960
Type · Normalschrifterlass, 3 January 1941 · μονοτονικό, 12 January 1982 · Greek Font Society for the Greek faces
Paper · standard grammages and shades as sold by trade paper merchants