How to choose colours for a flyer

Colour is the first thing people notice on a flyer and the last thing that should decide whether it works. A flyer in two quiet colours with sharp contrast will be read; a flyer in five bright ones with pale text on a photograph will be admired from across the room and ignored up close. Choosing colours well is mostly about restraint and one piece of arithmetic.

Two colours and a neutral

Start with three roles, not three favourite colours:

• a brand colour for the one block that carries the offer or the headline
• a supporting colour for secondary panels, dividers or icons
• a neutral, usually near black, for body text on a light background

That structure keeps colour doing a job. The eye goes to the strongest colour first, so the strongest colour should sit on the thing you most want read.

The grand opening flyer example shows the restraint in practice. Its terracotta palette appears as one solid block on the date poster, and on the offer sheet it shrinks to a single discount chip. The cafe menu flyer example goes further, with one deep forest green carrying the header, the table rows and the footer and no second accent anywhere. Both read calmly because nothing competes with the one colour that matters.

Contrast is the rule that cannot bend

Every piece of text must stand out from what is behind it. WebAIM’s summary of the accessibility guidelines sets a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text and 3 to 1 for large text, defined as 18 point and larger, or 14 point and larger in bold. It also warns that a ratio cannot be rounded up: a common grey at 4.47 to 1 fails.

The table below applies that arithmetic to the thirteen palettes behind the flyer examples on this site. Each value was computed from the colours in the palette files with the WCAG contrast formula, once for the brand colour used as text on the page background, and once for the palette’s own text colour set on a brand coloured fill. In every one of the thirteen, the main text colour against the page is at least 13.7 to 1, so body text is never the problem. The brand colour is.

Three palettes show the pattern clearly. Terracotta’s orange scores 2.4 to 1 as text on white but 8.7 to 1 as a fill behind black text. Seafoam’s bright aqua scores 1.9 to 1 as text and 11.2 to 1 as a fill. Deep Indigo, on its dark page, scores 2.7 to 1 as text and 7.4 to 1 as a fill behind white. The lesson generalises beyond these files: a bright colour belongs behind text, not in it. Dark brand colours, such as Prism’s violet at 11.2 to 1 or Prestige’s navy at 14.8 to 1, work either way.

The embedded beauty sale flyer example uses Prism across all three of its designs, a bold single offer poster, a sheet of three skin care packs and a guide to reading an ingredient label. One palette across three very different layouts is what makes them read as one shop.

Print is not the screen

A flyer designed on a monitor is lit from behind. A printed one is lit by whatever room it hangs in. Colours that glow on screen, especially vivid greens, cyans and oranges, often come out duller on paper because ink cannot reproduce every colour a screen can.

Two habits help. Prefer mid tones and deep colours for anything large, and use the brightest colour in small doses. Then print a test page on the printer or stock you will actually use, and look at it in the light where the flyer will hang. The other differences between a printed flyer and a social post, from resolution to copy length, are covered in print flyer vs digital flyer.

Brand colours and colour blind readers

Brand colours are a starting point, not a rule that overrides legibility. If your brand colour is a pale or bright shade, use it for a fill, a border or a badge, and set text in the palette’s dark neutral.

Design for the readers who see colour differently. Colour Blind Awareness puts colour vision deficiency at about 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women, with red and green deficiencies the most common. A sale price marked only by turning it red disappears for a meaningful share of passers by. Add a word such as Sale, a badge, or a struck through old price, so the meaning survives without the colour.

Remember too how people read. Nielsen Norman Group’s eyetracking work describes readers who scan headings and the starts of lines rather than reading everything. Colour can guide that scan to the right headings, but only if it is used sparingly enough to stand out.

Picking a palette in four steps

1. Start from the setting. A flyer for a dental clinic, a gym and a residents’ meeting should not look alike. The examples above use Softmint for the clinic, Volt for the gym and Newsprint, an almost black brand colour on a warm paper tone, for the community notice.
2. Decide where the brand colour goes. Name the one block it fills: the headline band, the offer badge or the date panel. If you cannot name it, the colour has no job yet.
3. Check the brand colour both ways. Look up, or measure, its contrast as text on the page and as a fill behind text. If it fails as text, keep it as a fill.
4. Test in grey. Print or view the flyer in greyscale. If the headline, the price and the action still stand out, the hierarchy does not depend on colour, and colour blind readers will find them too.

Common mistakes

Brand colour as body text. It looks on brand and reads badly. Put it behind the text instead.

Text over a busy photograph. Contrast varies across the image, so part of the line always fails. Use a solid panel.

Too many accents. Three competing colours cancel each other out. The concert flyer example keeps one deep indigo and lets a warm photograph supply the rest.

Meaning carried by colour alone. Red for sale and green for new is invisible to many readers. Add words.

Trusting the screen. Check a printed page before a full run. A theme is a system of colours applied together, as what a colour palette is explains, so choose the whole theme for contrast rather than one colour at a time.

Build it

The flyer themes page lists 99 themes: 88 synthesised from palettes and 21 hand authored, grouped in the panel as Top picks and More palettes. The 88 palettes fall into four categories, 35 cool, 21 vibrant, 18 warm and 14 neutral. A theme recolours the whole flyer at once, including chart series, which take their colours from the theme because flyer charts have no separate colour control. A text element can also take a custom hex colour, which stays fixed if you later change theme. There are 27 fonts that can be switched separately. Exports are RGB with no CMYK conversion. The themes tutorial shows how to try several themes before settling.