Posters Display More than Words By Leah Ralph Contributing Writer They are everywhere you look - taped to doors, stuck to bulletin boards, and even plastered to the ground. There are thousands of posters hung around campus at any given time, and yet most students take their presence for granted.

JEREMY WECHSLER Prolific postering keeps Wesleyan students well-informed of campus issues and activities.

Those who commit their time to designing, printing, and posting them can easily be overlooked, but the posters are more important than what one might think at first glance.

"We are bombarded with posters. You have to look at some of them," said Dianah Barrett ’02.

The most important goal of postering is generating good word of mouth.

"Posters are nothing if people aren’t talking about it," said Eric Ducker ’00, a publicist for several plays.

One of the keys of getting people to notice a poster is the design. One bulletin board shows examples of everything from simple type to intricate pictures. Each person who designs posters generally has a slightly different style. For example, Ducker’s posters can generally be recognized for their large background picture over which boxes of text are placed.

Ducker takes pride in designing his posters. He believes that they are effective and interesting. Ducker puts a lot of energy into his posters, but to him that makes the difference between a poster that will be overlooked and one that will be read.

"When you do something, make an effort," he said. "If you have a poster that you didn’t put much time into, why should people go to the event?"

The next important factor in effective postering is the location. To the average observer, it may appear that posters are just stuck in random places. However, deciding where to put posters takes strategy since posters tend to be torn down so quickly.

According to Ducker, the average life of a poster is only one to two days. Some can stay up for weeks and others are removed within the hour, depending mostly on whether the poster is in a legal or an illegal space.

Unfortunately, the illegal spaces tend to be higher profile, which creates a problem: one wants a large number of people to see his poster, but he does not want it to be torn down. As Ducker said, "Sometimes you have to sacrifice one for the other."

Posters are normally torn down either by Physical Plant, when the posters are hung in illegal spaces, or by other postering groups. Although Ducker said it is rare for him to see groups maliciously tearing down or postering over other people’s posters, it does happen. This almost creates a competitive attitude among posterers, but Ducker said most still abide by laws of common courtesy.

Although it can be disheartening to see your hard work quickly torn down, that doesn’t stop Ducker from going out with another round of posters. He believes what he does is a service to the Wesleyan community and not just idle work.