Poster vs flyer: what is the difference?

Distance decides everything else

Letters shrink in apparent size in direct proportion to how far away the reader stands, so a line that is comfortable at 40 centimetres needs to be roughly five times taller to read equally well from two metres. That single fact explains most of the differences in the table. Body text on a flyer can sit at the 10 to 12 point range recommended for printed reading, while the smallest text on a wall poster has to be several times that. Bigger type means fewer words fit, so the poster's copy gets cut to what a person can take in while walking past. Photographs follow the same logic: detail that rewards a close look on a flyer becomes noise from across a room.

Attention versus information

A poster's first job is to stop someone. It competes with everything else on the wall, it gets a glance of a second or two, and it succeeds if the reader remembers one thing, usually the event and the date. A flyer's first job is to inform someone who has already chosen to look, because they picked it up or it arrived in their letterbox. That reader will give it longer, so it can carry proof, a price list, a short map, opening hours or a list of speakers. The practical consequence is that a poster is built around one image or one headline, and a flyer is built around a reading order.

Paper sizes and why they scale

The ISO A series gives both formats a shared family. A0 is one square metre, 841 by 1189 millimetres, and every smaller size is half the one before it: A1 is 594 by 841, A2 is 420 by 594, A3 is 297 by 420, A4 is 210 by 297 and A5 is 148 by 210. Because each sheet keeps the same proportion, a layout can be enlarged from A4 to A2 without cropping. That is convenient for printing, and it is also the trap: the shape carries across perfectly while the reading distance does not, so an enlarged flyer arrives on the wall with four times the words anyone will stop to read.

Research posters are a different animal

One kind of poster breaks the rules above. An academic or conference poster at A0 is dense by design, with sections, figures, tables and references, because its readers stop in front of it on purpose and stand a metre or two away for several minutes. It sits closer to a large printed document than to an advertising poster. It still borrows the poster's discipline at the top, where the title and one key finding have to reach across an aisle, but below that it behaves more like a long flyer read standing up.

Common mistakes

Scaling a flyer up to poster size, so a wall carries six paragraphs of small print. Scaling a poster down to a handout, so the headline fills half the page and the details become too small to read. Putting a thumbnail sized QR code on a window poster that nobody can scan from the footpath. Leaving the date and place in body text on a poster, when those are the only things a passer-by needs. Using the same photograph at both sizes without checking that its subject still reads when the image is shown ten times larger or much smaller.

How the two differ in the builder

Flyers and posters live side by side in the builder, with posters on their own tab. Flyer print pages are A4 Portrait at 1240 by 1754 pixels or A4 Landscape at 1754 by 1240, set at 150 DPI, and an A4 page exports at 2480 by 3508 pixels, which is A4 at 300 DPI. Posters come in two sizes, A0 Portrait at 1656 by 2340 and A0 Landscape at 2340 by 1656, both at 50 DPI so the working canvas stays renderable, with 40 templates split 20 per size. An A0 portrait board exports at 3312 by 4680 pixels, about 100 pixels per inch at full size, and a poster generation bills at twice the credits of a flyer.

Questions people ask