Which flyer size to use, by purpose: 56 flyers counted

Every flyer design counted here starts at A4 portrait. On 13 September 2026 the 56 flyer examples on this site carried 168 finished designs, three per flyer, and all 168 are built on the A4 portrait canvas of 1240 by 1754 pixels, whatever the purpose: a sale, a school open day, a plumber, a webinar. Every one of them also lists native versions for the other seven canvas sizes. So the useful answer to “which flyer size to use” is A4 portrait for the version that carries the details, then a social size chosen by where the flyer will be seen. The corpus is this site’s own growing example set, not a count of flyers in circulation.

What was counted

Each flyer example stores its three designs as finished HTML with the canvas width and height, and a list of the other native sizes that design was authored for. A script read the size of every design, then read every line of text to find the things that tie a design to paper or to a screen:

• Words on the design, counted as runs of letters or figures.
• A date, meaning a day and month or a named weekday.
• A street address, a line with a street type and a number.
• A phone number and a web address.
• The smallest text size on the design, in canvas pixels.

The categories group the 56 flyers by purpose: sales and seasonal offers, events and community, services and trades, launches, and classes. The table below this article gives the counts for each.

Sizes by flyer purpose

This part of the count is short, because there is nothing to split. 63 of 63 sales designs, 42 of 42 event designs, 36 of 36 service designs, 15 of 15 launches and 12 of 12 classes start at A4 portrait. None of the examples was authored at A4 landscape or at a social size first.

That is not a limit of the canvas list. There are eight canvas sizes: A4 portrait at 1240 by 1754 pixels, A4 landscape at 1754 by 1240, Instagram post at 1080 by 1080, Instagram story at 1080 by 1920, Facebook post at 1200 by 630, LinkedIn post at 1200 by 627, Facebook cover at 820 by 312 and Twitter header at 1500 by 500. The print presets are authored at 150 dots per inch, and every export is captured at twice the canvas, so an A4 page leaves as a 2480 by 3508 pixel file, which is 300 dots per inch at 210 by 297 millimetres.

The count cannot say why every example starts there, but what the designs carry points to the reason.

What pulls a design towards print or a feed

A typical design here carries 106 words. 34 designs carry 60 words or fewer; 31 carry more than 150, and the longest, a beauty sale explainer on how to read a product label, carries 388.

The details behind those words are the kind a person reads standing in front of a noticeboard:

• 116 designs, 69 percent, give a web address.
• 104 designs, 62 percent, give a date.
• 65 designs, 39 percent, give a street address.
• 50 designs, 30 percent, give a phone number.
• 10 designs carry all four.

Events lead on dates and addresses: 37 of 42 event designs carry at least one, because an event flyer exists to get somebody to a place at a time. The community meeting flyer puts a venue, a date and a phone number on its annual general meeting notice. Events and services both lean on web addresses, 34 of 42 and 27 of 36, because both send people somewhere to book. Sales lead on phone numbers, 33 of 63.

The smallest text on a typical design is 18 pixels, about 8.6 points in print, and the smallest anywhere is 11 pixels, about 5 points, a small print line on a Fathers Day poster. That is normal for a sheet held in the hand. It is not normal for a phone screen.

Every design made at every size

Each of the 168 designs lists seven other native sizes: A4 landscape, Instagram post, Instagram story, Facebook post, LinkedIn post, Facebook cover and Twitter header. Switching a page to one of those sizes swaps in the version of the design laid out for that shape, rather than squeezing the A4 page, and content carries over slot by slot. Where a design has no native version for a size, the current layout is scaled instead.

The arithmetic shows why a re-layout matters. Shrinking a whole A4 page until its height fits a 1080 pixel square would take it to about 62 percent, and the median smallest line of 18 pixels would drop to about 11. A native square version instead gives the headline and the offer the room, and a square simply cannot hold 106 words at a readable size. Plan for the social version to carry less: the headline, the offer, the date and one action.

The open day flyer shows the spread inside one brief. Its course columns design carries 221 words, a street address and the date for a reader who wants to plan a visit. Its “See it before you choose it” design carries 57 words and no address, which is the one to start from for a square post.

The size nobody starts with

None of the 168 designs was authored at a banner size first, and that is sensible. The Facebook cover at 820 by 312 pixels and the Twitter header at 1500 by 500 are long thin strips that hold a headline and little else, and they are set once for a season, not per campaign. LinkedIn’s own guidance for page posts is an image at 1200 by 627 pixels, a 1.91 to 1 ratio, which is also a wide, shallow frame. Each is a version of a flyer, never the place where its details live.

The same is true of the smaller print sizes. There is no A5, DL or US Letter preset, so a letterbox handout starts as A4 portrait and is scaled at the printer.

Choosing a size for your flyer

Start from where the flyer will be met.

1. Noticeboard, shop window or counter: A4 portrait, 210 by 297 millimetres. It holds the date, the address and the fine print.
2. Letterbox drop in Australia: A4 fits Australia Post’s large unaddressed mail size, up to 260 by 360 millimetres and 100 grams. A DL handout at 99 by 210 fits the small size, up to 130 by 240. An A5 sheet, 148 millimetres wide, is too wide for the small size.
3. Instagram or Facebook feed: the 1080 by 1080 post, carrying the headline, offer and one action.
4. Stories: 1080 by 1920, with text kept away from the top and bottom of the frame.
5. LinkedIn: 1200 by 627.

For the full list of millimetres, pixels and export sizes, see the flyer sizes guide, and for the most asked single number, A4 flyer size in pixels. The weekly deals flyer is a useful case of a design that carries unit prices and belongs on paper.

How to use this

Build the A4 portrait version first with every detail on it, then make the social versions from it. The flyer sizes page lists all eight canvases and which sizes share a layout. To switch a finished design to each social size and check what moved, follow resize one flyer for every social size. Canvas size is set per page, so change it on every page of a multi page flyer, and remember the exports have no bleed or crop marks and are RGB, which a commercial printer will want to know before a print run.