Which Poster Size is Right for You? 🇺🇸

Posters are made in all different sizes. The size of a poster is affected by when it was printed, for which country it was created and where it was used. There are no universal international standards and this can make things complicated. Picking the right size thus starts by understanding different size options. As a next step you need to consider the size of the room where you plan to mount your poster. This is similar to buying a cinema ticket: if a poster is too large given the size of a room it can be difficult to view it. To use the cinema metaphor: you want to avoid having a front row seat and it’s better to be seated somewhere a bit further back. 

Intro to Standard Poster Sizes
Poster comes in all sorts of sizes. On our website you can filter posters conveniently by size. To make things easy for you we have grouped them into four categories: Height <50cm, Height <100cm, Height <150cm and Height <200cm. The table below provides a more detailed overview of poster sizes commonly sold on Vintoz.com.

Which Poster Size is Right for You?

As mentioned in the opening paragraph, besides the availability of the poster you are looking to buy in the right size, the dimensions of the room where you plan to mount the poster is an important factor. This is comparable to buying a TV: the distance from your sofa to the TV determines the ideal display size. The table below provides an indication as to which poster type may be right for you. This is really just for reference personal preference. In the end, whichever poster you pick has to be right for you!

Portrait versus Landscape Poster
Of the many vintage movie posters that we offer some are landscape and some are portrait style. Portrait orientation means that the height of a poster exceeds its width, whereas landscape format means the poster is wider than it is tall (sometimes also referred to as vertical vs horizontal orientation). Both poster styles have pros and cons: for larger format posters it can be easier to go with a landscape orientation so that the height of a wall does not become a limiting factor, or to prevent furniture from covering part of a poster. For landscape orientation, our selection of Halfsheets and British Quad posters provides an ideal solution. Portrait orientation on the other hand is more suitable when portraying people and many movie posters feature the actors appearing in films. Scientific research further indicates that portrait orientation is better for remembering specific details while the landscape orientation supplements a high level understanding. So ultimately the most suitable poster orientation depends on personal preference, the poster design, and the wall space available.

Mounting Multiple Posters
A nice way to display in particular smaller posters is to arrange them in a collection. That way you can avoid having one large visual element dominate the overall look and feel of a room while also creating a pleasant visual variety. Many poster enthusiasts opt for this approach as they grow their collection over time. 

Trivia: How Poster Sizes Have Changed Over Time
Out of curiosity we went through the Vintoz vintage movie poster archive to analyse which poster sizes seem to have been more common during which periods of time. Note that this analysis does not claim to be scientifically valid, but rather represents a snapshot of our inventory.  Posters with a height in between 20-30 inches have become more common over time: 60% of all posters from the 1970s fall in this category, whereas they accounted for only around 40% of all posters from the 1930s. On the other hand, posters with heights in between 10-20 inches represent close to 40% of our stock that dates back to the 1930s, but less than 20% of our posters from the 1970s. This may be caused by the evolution of professional printing, which supports larger formats or simply because smaller posters can be preserved easier and thus a larger stock of historic vintage posters is available in small sizes.