Printable personalised poster: the gift that arrives tonight

Thursday, 10 pm, and the birthday is on Saturday

Thursday, ten o’clock at night. The birthday lunch is on Saturday at her parents’ place, and you’ve just realised the present isn’t coming: the tracking page has been saying “in transit” since Tuesday. Or you never ordered anything in the first place. It happens, far more often than anyone admits. You’ve got a day and a half, a bank card and a phone.

You know how this goes. The scented candle from the shopping centre. The gift card in an envelope, which politely says “I had no idea what to get you”. The paperback grabbed off the bestseller table. Nothing shameful, nothing anyone will remember either — and this, of all times, was when you wanted to give something with her name on it, her town, a date that only means something to the two of you.

A parcel plays by its own rules: even if it’s dispatched within 48 hours, it still needs days on the road. A file doesn’t. It’s the poster you put together tonight on the sofa, arriving through a link a few minutes after you pay — and on paper tomorrow, at the print shop at the end of the street.

Why choose the file over the printed poster

Running late isn’t the only reason. The file makes sense whenever the problem is the parcel, not the poster — and that’s more often than you’d think.

• You’re short on time. Ordered in the evening, printed the next day: it’s the only personalised gift in the shop that fits into a single day.
• You live far away. Our printed posters travel within France and the European Union. The file doesn’t go through customs at all: in Geneva, Toronto or Boston, it gets printed two streets away.
• The frame’s already there. A 30 × 40 bought last year and never filled, a 50 × 70 waiting behind the wardrobe: the file has that size in it, all that’s left is to print it.
• Two people want it on their wall. Parents and grandparents, the best man and the maid of honour, a brother and a sister: the same file prints once for each of them.
• Money’s tight. €8.90 for all five sizes at once, no delivery charge; you pay for the printing wherever you get it done, at local prices.

How it works, from checkout to the wall

You design the poster on its product page like any other: the place, the date, the names, the style. The preview follows every word you type, and that’s exactly what we send you. When you choose the options, pick “Print-ready file” instead of the printed poster. If the file is all you’re ordering, there’s no address to give — just a name and an email.

Once you’ve paid, an email arrives with a link. The files are made while you’re reading it — usually within a few minutes — and the link page updates on its own. The link never expires. Keep that email: you’ll need it the day your laptop gives up, or the day someone asks “could you print me one too?”

After that, it’s all down to you. Download, send the file to the print shop or take a USB stick to the photo counter, pick up the print, frame it. Four steps, and the longest one is usually finding the Sellotape for the wrapping paper.

1. The link lands in your inbox
2. Download it
3. Print it
4. Hang it on the wall

Which size to pick, and which file to hand over

You don’t have to choose a size when you order: the link holds all five, from A4 to 70 × 100, each as a PDF and a PNG. Ten files, one poster. So the right size is whatever frame you already own, or whatever you find tomorrow in the homeware aisle — A4, 30 × 40 and 50 × 70 frames are sold everywhere.

To see which one suits that wall, hold a sheet of A4 against it: that’s the smallest, for a desk or a shelf. A 30 × 40 is that sheet with a generous border all round. A 50 × 70 fills the wall above a bed or a small sofa. A 70 × 100 can be seen from the doorway.

As for the file: the PDF is what print shops and copy shops expect, and it comes out at the right size without fiddling with settings. The PNG is an image, for a photo-printing website that asks you to upload a picture rather than a document. Both are 300 dots per inch, the resolution print shops ask for: even at 70 × 100, the lettering stays sharp even with your nose pressed against it.

Where to print it, and on what paper

For A4, your own printer can do the job tonight, on thick paper. Choose “Fit to page” in the print window: it’ll leave a thin white edge — most home printers can’t print right to the edge of the sheet — and a mount hides it nicely. For a shop-quality result, and for every size above A4, go to a professional.

A print shop, the photo counter at a pharmacy or a supermarket, an online printing service: they can all print a PDF. For 50 × 70 and 70 × 100, ring before you go, because it needs a large-format printer and not every shop has one. Small sizes are often printed while you wait, big ones the same day or the next.

Paper is half the result. Ask for a thick matte paper, 200 to 250 gsm: it’s what we use for our own prints, it doesn’t buckle in the frame and it doesn’t bounce the window light back at you. Glossy photo paper is perfect for holiday snaps; behind glass it turns into a mirror.

What doesn’t change when you choose the file

It’s the same poster, down to the last pixel: same page, same words, same style as if we’d printed it ourselves. So check the names and the date before you pay, just as you would for a print. A typo in a name prints every bit as faithfully as everything else, and it’s the one detail nobody can catch for you.

And a present is still a present. A file doesn’t come wrapped, so wrap it: a cardboard tube and a ribbon, a sheet of brown paper, or the frame already on the wall when she walks into the room. On Saturday nobody will ask where it was printed. They’ll ask how on earth you knew it had to be that street.