How do I make a poster without design software?

Four, and only three of them are any good. You can use a template editor, hire someone, describe what you want to a tool that lays it out for you, or open a word processor and fight it.

• Template editors. Canva and Adobe Express both have free tiers that cover a one-off poster. Canva Pro runs about $15 a month per person. You pick a template, replace the text, and adjust what the replacement broke.
• A freelancer. On Fiverr a single flyer runs $25 to $150 depending on how much the designer has to invent. A local designer bills $50 to $150 an hour. You get judgement and a real file. You also get a round trip.
• Describe it. You write the sentence, something else does the layout, and you change it by asking. This category barely existed two years ago and is where the search growth is.
• Google Docs or Word. Free, already open, and genuinely fine for a specials sheet taped inside a window. It will never look designed, because it is not a design tool.

The honest numbers, measured on the boring case of one poster for one event. A template editor takes 20 to 40 minutes the first time and 10 to 15 once you know where everything is. A freelancer takes one to three days for the first draft and another day per round of changes. Describing it takes under a minute per version, including the changes.

The template number surprises people because the editing is not the slow part. Choosing is. There are hundreds of near identical happy hour templates, and picking among them is a real decision that burns real time before you have typed a word.

The freelancer number is not about their speed. It is the round trip. Two changes on a Tuesday poster mean the poster goes up Thursday.

One message, big enough to read from across the room, and one thing to do. Almost every bad small business poster is bad for the same reason: it tries to carry five messages at equal weight, so a person walking past reads none of them.

A practical test for a printed poster. Print it, put it on a wall, and walk back ten feet. If you cannot read the headline, the headline is too small. On an 11 by 17 poster that usually means the main line is around two inches tall. On a phone screen, the same test is looking at the thumbnail in your camera roll.

Then the four facts a person needs to act: what it is, when, where, and how to take part. If the poster is for a recurring thing, the day matters more than the date. "Every Thursday" sticks; "September 18" does not.

For print, three sizes cover almost everything. A flyer is 8.5 by 11 inches, which is a sheet of standard paper and costs nothing to run off. A counter or window poster is 11 by 17. A poster meant to be seen from the street is 18 by 24.

For social, the pixel sizes are 1080 by 1080 for a square Instagram post, 1080 by 1350 for a portrait post, and 1080 by 1920 for a story. Portrait at 1080 by 1350 takes the most vertical space in the feed, which is why so much small business creative is that shape.

One thing that trips people up: a poster designed for print and the same poster for Instagram are different documents. The print one can carry small text because people stand close to it. The Instagram one cannot, because it is competing at thumbnail size.

Four cases, and they are worth naming because nobody selling these tools does. Send the job to a designer or a print shop when any of them apply.

• A commercial print run. A printer wants a PDF in CMYK with bleed and crop marks. Most describe-it tools, including ours, hand you a PNG. Fine for your own office printer, not for a thousand copies at a press.
• Anything built on your own photography. If the poster is a photograph of your actual food, room, or product, you need the photograph. A generated illustration is a different thing and not a substitute.
• Multi page documents. Booklets, four page menus, and programs are layout jobs with page flow. Use a real layout tool.
• Regulated copy. Anything carrying legal terms, alcohol notices, or disclosure text needs a human reading the final proof.

Write the poster as one sentence before you open anything. What it is, when, and what someone should do. If you cannot say it in a sentence, no tool is going to rescue the poster.

Then pick by what you want to spend. If you enjoy designing or need exact control, open Canva. If it has to be right and on brand for a campaign that matters, hire someone. If it is a chore between two other chores, describe it and move on.

Dovey is the third one. You text it what you need, like "a poster for our happy hour thursday, half off drinks", and the finished poster comes back in the same thread in well under a minute. Changes are replies: make it green, translate it to Spanish, move the date. It is free for your first 3 designs with no card, and it works in Messages on an iPhone or over SMS anywhere else.