Print flyer vs digital flyer

A printed flyer and a social post look like the same job with different dimensions. They are not. A sheet of paper is picked up, held at reading distance, and given as long as the reader wants to give it. A post arrives between two other posts, at arm’s length, on a backlit screen, from a person whose thumb is already moving.

Almost everything that matters follows from that difference, and size is the least of it.

Read close, read fast

Nielsen Norman Group’s reading research puts comprehension of an average page at around 28% of the words, and finds that people scan rather than read, weighting the first few words of anything heavily. A printed flyer partly escapes that, because the act of picking something up is already a decision to engage. A feed does not escape it at all.

So the same content has two different budgets. On paper you can afford a price list, a short paragraph and a footer. On a feed you get a headline, one supporting line, and a destination.

Resolution and dots per inch

Print has a physical size, so resolution is a ratio: pixels divided by inches. Screens do not, so a social file is only a pixel count.

Commercial printers converge on 300 dots per inch at final size, and PrintingForLess specifically asks for 400 where an image has type inside it, because rasterised type is where softness shows first. That is the number to design to.

The canvases here are authored at 150 dots per inch, which puts A4 at 1240 by 1754 pixels, and the export captures at twice the canvas. An A4 flyer therefore leaves at 2480 by 3508, which is exactly 300 dots per inch at 210 by 297 mm. The same doubling applies to every canvas, so a square post leaves at 2160 by 2160, which is far more than a feed needs and gives the file something in reserve after the platform re-encodes it. The full set of sizes is in the flyer sizes guide.

If you are placing a photograph, check the photograph rather than the canvas. A 900 pixel wide image dropped into a slot that prints 120 mm wide is landing at about 190 dots per inch, and no export setting will recover the detail. The DPI calculator will tell you the density a given file lands at and the largest size it prints sharply.

Trim and bleed

This is the difference that costs money when it is missed.

Bleed is artwork extended past the line where the sheet will be cut, so that a guillotine drifting by half a millimetre still cuts through colour rather than through white paper. Typical amounts are one eighth of an inch imperially, or 2 to 5 mm metric depending on the printer, and about 6 mm for large-format posters where the paper moves more.

The export here has no bleed, no crop marks and no CMYK conversion. The file is the trim size exactly. That is the right default for a screen and the wrong one for a press, so if your printer’s template asks for 3 mm on each edge, either add it in their template or ask them what they want to do. Most will scale the artwork up slightly, which is harmless as long as you left a quiet margin at the edges in the first place. There is more on this in does a flyer need bleed.

Text size

On paper, text size is physical. The designs measured across the flyer examples on this site run from about 10 points at the smallest to about 40 points for a headline at A4, a range of roughly four to one. Ten points is comfortable at arm’s length on a page and is where footers, terms and contact lines sit.

On a screen, none of that transfers. The same 1240 pixel wide design displayed on a phone is about 70 mm across, so a 20 pixel footer line becomes roughly 1.2 mm of physical text. It is legible, just, and it is not where you put anything that matters. The arithmetic for phone-sized type, and the interface that sits on top of it, is worked through in Instagram story size, safe zones and text size.

The practical rule: when a design moves from paper to a feed, the smallest text has to go, not shrink. Delete the terms line and the third contact method rather than setting them smaller.

Colour: RGB, and what a press will do with it

Screens are additive. They emit red, green and blue light and make white by combining all three. Presses are subtractive. They lay cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink that absorbs light, and white is whatever the paper is.

The two gamuts overlap but are not the same shape, and the colours a screen can show that a press cannot are exactly the ones designers like: saturated blues, vivid oranges, electric greens. Converted for print, they move to the nearest printable colour and look flatter than they did on the monitor.

Exports here are RGB. There is no CMYK conversion in the flyer code at all. For a digital post that is correct and nothing needs doing. For a press run it means the conversion happens at the printer’s end, using their profile, which is usually a better outcome than a guess made in a browser. What you should do is set expectations: if a brand colour is a saturated blue, ask the printer for a proof before committing to a long run.

Copy length and the one action

Print will carry a price list. The weekly deals flyer is a good demonstration: it is a fictional butcher and deli that rewrites its board every Monday, and one of its three designs is a four panel grid with a price per kilogram against every category. On a printed sheet in a shop window that works, because a person standing in front of it will read all four.

The same content as a square post is unreadable. The honest version for a feed is three items, or better, one: the best price, the headline, and where to get it. Everything else moves to the caption, which is a place people expect words.

The action changes with it. On paper you can offer a phone number, an address and a QR code, and let the reader pick. In a feed a phone number is friction and a QR code is meaningless, because the phone is already the screen. There is one destination and it needs to be one line.

Worth knowing before you plan around one: only 17 of the 172 flyer designs carry a QR slot, and a QR code cannot be added to a design that lacks one, because there is no QR tile in the Add items panel.

What to send the printer

Six things, in an email:

1. The finished PDF, and a note that it is trim size with no bleed.
2. The finished size in millimetres, written out.
3. Whether you want them to add bleed, and permission to scale slightly if so.
4. A note that the file is RGB and they should convert with their own profile.
5. The paper stock and finish.
6. A request for a proof if any brand colour is highly saturated.

That email prevents most of the problems that come back as a reprint. The one thing it cannot prevent is a design that was never laid out for the sheet it is being printed on, which is why the print version should be the one you make first.