Flyer design mistakes

The flyer design mistakes worth fixing before you print are these twelve: several messages competing, the business name used as the headline, too many text sizes, too many typefaces, type too small for the reading distance, low contrast, key facts scattered around the page, no price or date, no clear call to action, a stock photo that shows nothing, the wrong size for the channel, and text too close to the trimmed edge. The table under this article lists each with why it fails, the fix and an example flyer that avoids it.

Almost all of them come from adding rather than choosing. The fixes are mostly deletions.

Too much: messages, sizes and typefaces

Several messages. A flyer has one glance to work with. The fun run flyer is for a fictional athletics club’s harbour run with three distances, and it recognises that the only decision a reader makes is which distance to enter. Everything on the page serves that decision; nothing competes with it.

The business name as the headline. The largest words on the page are the ones most people read, so spending them on the company name answers a question the reader has not asked yet. Put the name in the logo and give the headline to the offer. The cleaning service flyer’s Half Price First Clean tells a homeowner what is on offer before they have looked for who is offering it.

Too many text sizes. Nielsen Norman Group’s principles of visual design suggest a layout generally uses no more than three sizes, and two to three typeface sizes to show what matters most. A flyer with six sizes has no hierarchy at all, because the reader cannot tell which size means important.

Too many typefaces. One family varied by size and weight looks designed; two similar families look like a mistake. If the brand needs a display face for the headline, use it once and nowhere else.

Too small, too faint

Type too small for the distance. A flyer in a hand and a flyer on a noticeboard need different sizes. The fun run’s poster design is built for a shop window, so its three distances sit in large icon rows that read from outside the glass, while its card design, meant for the club’s page, fits the same facts into one sentence.

Low contrast. WCAG 2.2 sets a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5 to 1 for normal text and 3 to 1 for large text. Pale grey on white, yellow on white and white on a busy photograph all fail, and paper under shop lights makes it worse than the screen suggests. The gym flyer uses a bright lime and charcoal palette but keeps the lime to the headline block and the offer chip; the promises underneath are in plain charcoal type, which is why they stay readable.

Nielsen Norman Group separates legibility, whether characters can be made out, from readability and comprehension. A flyer has to pass the first test before the other two matter.

Scattered facts, missing numbers

Key facts scattered. A reader looking for the date should find it in one second, next to the time, the place and the price. The fun run prints each distance with its start time and fee together: 2 km for kids at 7:30am for 12 dollars, 5 km at 8:00am for 35 dollars, 10 km at 8:30am for 45 dollars. Whichever design a reader meets, the comparison is in one block. The concert flyer does the same for a gig, putting the details a venue is asked about every week in one row on its full bill design: doors at 8.00pm, entry 28 dollars, 18 and over.

No price or no date. A flyer without a price collects enquiries rather than bookings. The workshop flyer prints the price beside the date on all three of its designs, and the fun run prints its entry close date on all three of its designs too, with a plain line that there are no entries on the day.

No call to action, or several. Every flyer should end on one action and one way to take it. The workshop flyer’s marketing morning design ends on Register now above a single short web address, so there is one thing to do and one place to do it.

The wrong image, the wrong size

A stock photo that shows nothing. An image should show the thing or the result. The gym flyer’s membership design uses a single wide shot of people mid lift behind the headline, which tells a reader what the room looks like at six in the morning better than several posed portraits could.

The same slot has a second trap: resolution. A photograph that looks sharp on a laptop can print soft once it is enlarged to fill half an A4 page. Check each image at the size it will print, not at the size it appears on screen: a photograph needs roughly 300 pixels for every inch it covers on paper. If the only image available is small, give it a smaller slot rather than stretching it, or replace it.

The wrong size for the channel. A4 artwork squeezed into a square post becomes unreadable, and a square post printed on A4 wastes half the page. Design each size as its own layout. The sizes and their pixel dimensions are in the flyer sizes guide.

Too close to the edge

Print shops cut flyers from larger sheets, and the cut moves slightly. Paperlust’s print checklist explains that a 1 to 2 mm shift in a stack changes where the blade meets the paper, and asks for text, logos and anything that must be seen to sit at least 3 mm inside the trim, with 5 mm suggested where a design has weight near its edges. Colour that runs to the edge needs 3 mm of bleed beyond the trim. What bleed is explains the idea in more detail.

Home printers add their own margin, because most cannot print to the edge of plain paper. A white margin around the content avoids both problems.

How to catch them before printing

Run these checks on a single test print, not on the screen:

1. Pin it up at the height and distance it will be seen and read the headline from there.
2. Time how long it takes to find the date, the price and the action. Each should take a second or two.
3. Print or view it in greyscale. Any meaning carried by colour alone will disappear.
4. Measure the gap between the edge and the nearest text.
5. Read every number aloud: price, date, time, phone and web address.
6. Count the text sizes and the typefaces.

Build it

Two of these mistakes are hard to make in the flyer builder, and it helps to know why. The theme panel sets one font for the whole flyer from 27 families or the theme default, so a set of designs shares one typeface unless you deliberately override a single text box in the inspector. Text sizes come from the theme’s size steps rather than a number typed by eye, which keeps the hierarchy consistent. The flyer fonts page lists the families.

Colour comes from the 99 themes, with text colour set from the theme’s colour tokens or a custom hex value, and the guide to changing flyer colours and fonts with themes shows how one change restyles every element. The rest of the list is still yours to check: exports have no bleed, no crop marks and no CMYK conversion, uploaded images are cropped to fill their slot and cannot be repositioned inside it, and undo keeps the last 50 steps.