We’ve talked about printing posters in the past, even reviewed multiple applications, like PosteRazor or Rasterbator, that can help you cut bigger posters up, and piece them together with regular-sized paper.

Somehow we skipped the first installment; where to find suitable posters for printing? Google’s a good guess, but read on for MakeUseOf’s top 4 sites to find free printable posters.

Movie Poster Archive

Practically everyone has had a movie poster brandish his wall at some point in his life. I have trouble believing anyone who denies the fact. Apart from being often beautifully designed, movie posters carry a vibe and history that’s unknown to most other formats.

Movie Poster Archive is, without doubt, the number one source for free printable movie posters. They offer an impressive selection of current and vintage movie posters. Admittedly, at 586 pixels width, these posters won’t soon pass a close-up inspection, but works perfectly fine for personal use.

TypographicPosters

The second type of poster – closing in fast behind movie posters – are typographical. Typography is the art of arranging typefaces in an eye-pleasing manner. This site pulls in these typographic posters from 408 different directories, at the time of writing. Depending on the artist, this might be from a Portuguese anti-smoking campaign, or a Canadian festival line-up.

No matter the concept, every single one proves to be an interesting work of art. You can browse the site in large or small raster views, or by category. If you know what you’re looking for, you can also use the built-in search pane. At about 910 pixels width, these posters are also of better printing quality.

Poster-Street

Poster-Street is a very interesting site that offers free printable posters for every occasion; be it for work, school, or your home. The posters you find on Poster-Street are aimed at witty one-liners and entertaining compositions, but aren’t of the same visual quality as said posters above. Nevertheless, it offers a good source for decorating posters and conversation-starters.

The resolution of these posters also far precedes most other online poster alternatives. In fact, most of the posters are vectored PDFs, and can be printed as large as you want, in crisp quality.

TechPosters

This last site couldn’t be left out from a nerdy poster line-up. On TechPosters.NET, you’ll find a variety of nerdy posters to sire your wall. These range from simple sheet-cheats, to infographs, and witty internet ads. If you’re a fervent internet user or tech enthusiast, you’ll be delighted by the posters offered on this site.

The resolution is highly dependent on the poster in question, because they’re pulled in from all over the web. In general, it’ll usually be between 500 and 1000 pixels wide, much like the other infographs you’ll see online.

Do you have any other tips for finding free printable posters? Let us know in the comments section below!

The program can be freely downloaded on PC, Mac, and Linux machines.  The best part?  It can open files from any other program!  Read more about Open Office here and here.

If you need inspiration or want to produce a specific kind of document, never fear!  Their free user-created Open Office templates are awesome, and can save you lots of time and money!

Truly, there is no reason to spend your hard earned cash on expensive software when you can get everything you need right in the Open Office suite.

If you need a word processing program, use OOO’s “Write” program; if you need a PowerPoint program, use their “Presentation” software. They even have an Excel-ish program and a database program like Access.

In addition to their powerful tools, they also offer a sweet repository of Open Office templates. You can choose between Business, Education, and Personal templates.  These user created templates are simple to download and simple to use.

This article will highlight some of the most useful templates available in each of the three sections.

Business

The Business section is stuffed full of excellent and resourceful templates.  If you want to publish ANYTHING, you should stop here first.  Open Office offers templates for every make and model of book, magazine, or document.  In addition to the standard letters and reports, you can also find lots of neat extras!

Business Cards

Every person needs to have a business card.  While there are lots of great places to get them made online or in your community, you can use Open Office to create your very own!

This simple template opens and is ready to be completed!  It takes just seconds, and you can use the menu to customize the look to your needs.

Event Posters

To get your business recognized or to announce sales or other groovy events, you might want to use the awesome poster template!

Again, you can change the picture, the background color, the fonts, etc.  Or, if you just need something quick, fill in the blanks and click print!

Time Cards

If you have employees, you need to keep track of the time and pay rates. Open Office hosts a simple template that will allow you to do both!

DVD Inserts

If you provide DVDs to your customers, you might want to include a professional looking DVD insert.  This template is incredibly easy to use!

Finally, you will need to know how to charge your customers, and Invoices are a legal agreement between you and your client.  The template calculates math and has spots for all of the necessary legal information.

Education

Educators will find many of the OOO templates quite handy!  Instead of purchasing expensive software or trying to create a tool on your own, you can instead peruse their repository of templates.

Lesson Plan Templates

There are a few different lesson plan styles, but all of them are fantastic.  They are easy to edit and modify according to your particular needs.  I like this one, but, again, there are others that are just as fabulous!

Rubrics

If you use a rubric for grading or you want to try out a few different types, OOO has the right resources for you!  I like to provide a hard copy of the grading rubric at the start of an assignment, and I like to provide a copy to parents in advance of a lesson.

These various templates are a great starting point for me, and they are off-the-shelf ready for new teachers, too!

Formatted Paper Guidelines, Formatted Paper Templates

If you are in college, you are familiar with the challenge of formatting papers in a particular documentation style (MLA, Chicago, Turabian, IEEE).  OOO has ALL of the formats ready for you to use!  I totally wish they had this kind of template when I was in college.  Be careful, though, and always make sure you use the correct style as instructed by your professor.

Grid Paper

If your son is in high school, and it is 11:00pm when he decides to start his math homework, NEVER FEAR!  OOO has printable grid paper for FREE!  No more midnight Walmart runs!

Gradebook Templates

There are several different kinds of gradebook templates, and you can customize each one to your liking.  I love that they are set up to do the math for you!

Personal

There are lots of times when you need to make a certain type of document for your kids or for the country club.  Who has time to search all over the web when you can stop by OOO and get what you need for free?

Recipe Cards

Every organization I have ever belonged to has made a recipe book as a fundraiser. Since I don’t cook much, I always struggle to remember what a recipe actually looks like.

OOO has a fantastic selection of recipe card templates that make the job of sharing recipes so easy!

March Madness and Sports Grids

A little friendly competition among friends is fun, but it can be such a pain to figure out those charts for Final Four!  OOO comes to the rescue!  Just print these out, and you have instant success.

Shopping List Templates

If you live in a place like Lakeville, you only get to a big grocery store once a month. Instead of just using slips of napkin, we printed out two of OOO’s shopping lists and we use one at the Big-Ole Grocer and the other at the Farmer’s Market.

It saves us so much time, and I don’t have to find those little slips of paper!

Family Budget Planners

There are all sorts of different kinds of budgets and planners to download and print. There are, literally, pages and pages of different ways to organize your cash.  This is just one example, but there are so many more that you might like!

Creative Writing Tools and Templates for Script Writing

Script writing software is expensive.  Comic book layout software is expensive. Generally, most folks that want to write these kinds of ditties don’t have the income to afford them.  OOO has a whole host of resources for the aspiring writer.

Need to write a commercial?  Want to write a memoir of your life?  Need to format a screenplay?  OOO has the tools for you!

The Bottom Line

Open Office has awesome templates for every possible situation.  The best part is that these resources are fast to download (on any platform) and are FREE!  Let us know what Open Office templates YOU like.

Why is a poster so appealing? Maybe it’s because a poster is more than a photo.  It is something that captures life in greater width and height. That’s why posters also easily become keepsakes.

Growing up, I had to buy my posters and the larger the size, the higher went the costs. I also managed to create a few self made ones, but they were more of collages, a glued up motley of my favorite images.

We didn’t have the tools for the job that could help us make our own posters. But thanks to software, now stitching together a poster is only about getting the image right. The ink and paper costs are there but the software does the poster personalization.

PosteRazor is a free software that easily helps you make your own posters at home. All that you need is an idea, the PosteRazor freeware and a standard color printer. PosteRazor is open source and a really small download at 484KB.

Poster lovers can check out a very early MakeUseOf HowTo: Free & Huge Custom Poster For Your Wall article that shows how to print out sections of a large image on standard size paper, and assemble it all as a huge poster.

PosteRazor also takes a Raster image as an input file and cuts it into pieces that can be printed out using a standard sized printer. The cut pieces can then be assembled into a complete poster by gluing the edges together.

What’s simple about PosteRazor is the wizard that has just five steps from the starting image to the finished poster.

1. Browse to your image and load it into PosteRazor. The original dimensions of the image file are indicated in this window.



2. Defining the paper size that your printer can handle is the critical part. The decision to fit the paper to the image or the image to the paper has to be made here. A few standard paper sizes are available from the dropdown. Alternatively, you can opt to go for a custom size.



3. Overlapping margin areas are needed for gluing the pieces together. Overlapping positions are for side by side borders of the divisions that will tile together in the final poster.



4. Defining the final poster size is choosing between a fixed size, panning it out over multiple sheets, or increasing the original size by a percentage.



5. In the final step, the poster is saved as a multi-page PDF file.



A PDF file is a universal document format and can be opened by a reader in all OS. Image color types also can be maintained across computers.

All that’s left now is the labor of printing the sheets out and assembling them together with glue on the overlapping margins.

As a simple tool to make your own scaled posters, PosteRazor has a few plusses going for it like its easy portability, very simple interface, and compatibility with Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. It also covers a large number of image formats like – BMP, DDS, Dr. Halo, GIF, ICO, IFF, JBIG, JPEG/JIF, KOALA, LBM, Kodak PhotoCD, PCX, PBM, PGM, PNG, PPM, Photoshop PSD, Sun RAS, TARGA, TIFF, WBMP, XBM, and XPM.

Creating posters is something you may not do every day. But if you find an image that you would love to turn into a poster, it helps to know about tools like PosteRazor that are just a download away.

Would you like to create a poster (or do you stop at the ink costs)? Which is your favored poster app for the task?