How to design a flyer

To design a flyer, make six decisions in order: the one message and who it is for, the size and where the flyer will be seen, a hierarchy of no more than three text sizes, one strong image, two colours and a neutral with enough contrast, and a single action placed where the reader’s eye finishes. Group related facts together with space between the groups, and remove anything that does not serve one of those decisions. The order matters more than any individual choice, because each decision constrains the next.

The table under this article sets out the steps with a rule of thumb for each and how a finished example handles it.

1. One message, one reader

Write the headline before you open any design tool. It should say what the reader gets, in words they would use, and it should be one idea. If it needs a comma or an “and”, it is two flyers.

The workshop flyer is three designs for a fictional training studio, and each headline names a single outcome: Marketing in a Morning, Decide With Your Data, Fix Your Website in a Day. Nobody reading one of those wonders what the workshop is for.

Decide the reader at the same time. A flyer for local business owners and a flyer for students can advertise the same workshop and still need different headlines, images and prices. What goes into the copy, in reading order, is covered in what to put on a flyer; this article is about arranging it.

2. Size before layout

Choose the size next, because it decides the reading distance and therefore everything about the hierarchy. An A4 sheet on a noticeboard is read at arm’s length or from a metre away; a square post is read on a phone; a letterbox flyer is read in a hallway.

A4 at 210 by 297 millimetres is the usual print default, and A4 in pixels explains the working canvas. If the flyer will also run on social media, plan the social version as its own layout rather than a crop of the print one. The differences go well beyond size, as print flyer vs digital flyer sets out.

3. A hierarchy of three sizes

Decide what is read first, second and third, and give each level its own size. Nielsen Norman Group’s principles of visual design put it simply: use relative size to signal importance, and a visually pleasing design generally uses no more than three different sizes.

The workshop flyer’s hierarchy is the same on all three designs. The headline is largest. The three step agenda comes second. The practical details, date, time, price and venue, come third. A reader who stops after the headline knows the offer; one who reads the second level knows the shape of the day; only someone already interested reads the details.

A fourth level of size is a warning sign. It usually means some text is fighting for a place it does not deserve.

Group the facts

Put facts that belong together close together, and separate the groups with space. This is the Gestalt principle of proximity, which Nielsen Norman Group describes as elements near each other being perceived as related, while elements spaced apart are seen as separate groups.

On a flyer, the groups are usually the offer, the proof and the practical details. The workshop flyer’s data day design gives date, venue and audience their own labelled blocks in a dark bar, so a reader scanning for one of them finds it in a second. The conference flyer does the same with separate blocks for date, venue and who should attend.

Align the groups to a few shared edges. Text that starts at five different left margins looks disorganised even when the content is good.

4. One strong image

Use one image that shows the thing or the result, large enough to read from the distance chosen in step two. A photograph of a person using what you sell beats four small stock photos and a clip art icon.

The sale flyer shows how an image choice depends on the job. Its photo led design opens with a made bed and a single number, up to 40 percent off, which is all a passer by reads from the footpath. Its second design drops the photo for a grid of four products with old and new prices, because the reader inside the shop is comparing prices, not browsing.

5. Two colours and a neutral

Pick two colours and a neutral, give each a job, and check that text is readable. One colour for the headline or the key band, one for accents such as a price or a button, and a dark neutral for body text on a light background.

Contrast is not a matter of taste. The WCAG 2.2 minimum is a ratio of 4.5 to 1 for normal text and 3 to 1 for large text, and those numbers are a sensible floor for print as well as screens, especially on paper viewed under shop lighting.

Use the same colours in the same roles across every version of the flyer. The workshop flyer runs one theme across its three designs, so a reader who sees the marketing morning on a noticeboard and the data day in a newsletter recognises the studio before reading a word. When colours carry a job, a reader learns it quickly: the price is always in the accent, the headline always in the strong colour.

Watch what happens to colour on paper. A saturated screen blue or orange often prints flatter, and a pale tint that looks elegant on a monitor can vanish on an office printer. Print one copy before you print a hundred.

6. One action, where the eye ends

End the reading path on a single action: a URL, a phone number or a QR code, not all three. Place it where the eye finishes, which on most layouts is the bottom of the page or the end of the details block.

The workshop flyer’s two designs with QR slots put the code beside the register bar or in the footer, and the third prints a short URL, so the path from reading to registering is a scan or a few seconds of typing. The open house flyer takes the principle further: the inspection time appears twice on the first sheet, because a buyer who loses the time loses the inspection.

Common mistakes

• Designing before writing. Layout cannot fix a vague headline.
• Centring everything. Centred paragraphs are hard to read; centre the headline and left align the rest.
• Filling every space. Empty space is what makes the important parts visible.
• Several calls to action. Each extra option lowers the chance of any of them.
• Text to the edge of the page. Printers trim, and home printers cannot print to the edge at all.

Build it

The flyer generator takes a written brief of up to 8,000 characters and four settings: language, theme, format and an optional template. The format is one of eight canvas sizes, from A4 portrait at 1240 by 1754 pixels to social sizes. Leave the template blank and you get two designs to choose from; pick one and you get that design filled in. Generation fills the text, image prompts and icons; the layout, size, fonts and colours come from the template and theme you choose, and it does not invent prices, dates, phone numbers or addresses you did not give it. See the AI flyer generator for the details.

After generation, the theme panel offers 99 themes and 27 fonts, and each page can move to another size, with the design’s own layout for that size swapped in where it exists. The guide to creating a flyer for Instagram and print walks through the whole flow from brief to export.