Design Poster Templates for High School Athletics

Enterprising graphic designers are always on the lookout for opportunities to make extra cash, and high school athletics is a gold mine in that respect. If you haven't tapped into the world of high school athletics, you're leaving money on the table - especially when it comes to poster templates. High school athletes, coaches, administrators, and - most of all - proud parents and grandparents love to showcase their favorite local stars in action on the court, on the field, and in the gym. Photographers figured this out long ago, and so many photographers routinely visit high school athletic events and take action snapshots to sell. You can get your share of this business with poster templates.

Create a poster template

All you have to do is create a few poster templates for your local (and regional) high school athletic teams, complete with logos, team colors and specific sport relevance (such as a football or volleyball). Next, attend events and take a few photos, or partner with a photographer to use their photos, and offer to sell posters to athletes and parents. Parents love to commemorate their kids in action, and posters are much bigger and bolder than any 5-inch by 7-inch snapshot.

Work with coaches and photographers

You can take it even further by approaching athletic directors, coaches, and school-hired photographers to make team photos complete with the athletes' names, roster positions, grades and other pertinent information. You can upsell by offering to take individual shots that go along with the team pictures. You could, for example, make a poster template that has a moderate-sized team photo on the bottom with a large individual action shot taking up the top two-thirds of the poster. Imagine offering high school athletes NBA-quality posters of themselves, which is exactly what you can do with poster templates. You can even allow parents to bring in their own photos to add to your templates, just in case they grabbed a great snapshot the photographer missed.

Branch out with other printed materials

Poster templates aren't the only things you can sell to the parents of high school athletes, either. Season-commemorating booklets, calendars, greeting cards, postcards and even stickers are all possible upsells for your posters. Brainstorm a bit, and with a bit of marketing savvy you should be able to clear hundreds if not thousands of dollars from every local athletic team, which means you could seriously earn upwards of $20,000 a year doing that alone. Make it a regional endeavor, and you have a full-time graphic design job doing nothing more than placing photographs into pre-made poster templates. Of course, you'll have to have the posters printed as well. For best results, choose a premium 100-pound gloss text or 100-pound gloss cover stock; or, for thicker paper, go with a 16-point glossy cover or 13-point recycled matte cover stock. All of these poster papers have elegant sheens that brim with brilliance, so you can showcase local athletes with the same grandeur professional athletes enjoy on the bedroom walls of so many hopefuls.