A5 vs A6 flyer: sizes and uses

Two halvings of the same sheet

Both sizes come from the ISO 216 A series, in which every size is the one above cut in half across its long side. Fold an A4 page in half and each half is A5; fold A5 in half and each half is A6. Because every size in the series keeps the ratio of one to the square root of two, about 1.41, an A5 layout scales down to A6 without cropping or stretching. That makes A5 and A6 unusually easy to produce as a pair: the same artwork can be printed at both sizes. The catch is that scaling shrinks everything by the same amount, so text that was comfortable on A5 ends up about 71 percent of its height on A6.

What each size can hold

A5 has twice the area of A6, and in practice it carries about twice the content at the same type size. That is room for a headline, a photograph, a short list of services or prices and the contact details, which is why A5 is so common for letterbox drops, event programmes and menus. A6 is a single glance. It suits one offer, one date or one discount code, with a web address or phone number, and it fits in a pocket, a wallet or beside a till. If the message needs a list, A5 is the better choice; if it needs to be kept, like a voucher or appointment card, A6 is. Body text on either should stay readable at arm's length, roughly 9 to 10 points at the smallest.

Cost, paper and distribution

Because two A6 flyers use the paper of one A5, A6 is cheaper per piece at the same stock, though the difference in a small print run is often modest, since setup rather than paper drives the price. Stock matters more to how a flyer feels than its size. Paperlust, an Australian print shop, describes 150 gsm gloss as the most ordered weight for DL, A5 and A4 flyers, and 115 gsm as the budget option for high volume leaflet drops. A6 cards meant to be kept often go much heavier, into postcard stock. For letterbox distribution, A5 is the everyday standard, while A6 is more often handed out, left on counters or inserted into parcels and bags.

Common mistakes

The first is shrinking a full A5 layout to A6 and printing it unchanged, leaving small print nobody can read. Cut the content instead, or rebuild the A6 version around the single most important line. The second is placing phone numbers and web addresses close to the edge, where a trim that drifts by a millimetre cuts them off; the smaller the flyer, the larger that risk is in proportion. The third is supplying the wrong pixel size, such as a social image of 1080 pixels square, when A6 at 300 DPI needs 1240 by 1748 pixels. The fourth is choosing a light paper for A6 cards meant to be kept, which curl and crease in a wallet within days.

A5, A6 and the flyer builder

Neither A5 nor A6 is one of the flyer builder's eight canvas sizes, which are A4 portrait at 1240 by 1754 pixels, A4 landscape at 1754 by 1240 and six social sizes, and there is no custom size option. What the ISO proportions give you is a clean route: design on A4 portrait and ask the printer to scale the PDF to A5 or A6, which keeps the layout intact because the shapes match. The A4 export is 2480 by 3508 pixels, which printed at A5 lands at about 424 pixels per inch and at A6 at about 600, more than enough. Design with type large enough for the final size in mind, since the builder shows it at A4. Exports are RGB PDF, PNG or JPG with no bleed or crop marks, so tell the shop the finished size.

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