How to Make a Flyer That People Actually Read

To make a flyer: pick the size from how it will be handed out, set 0.5 in margins, give it one dominant message readable from across a room, answer the five questions people actually have, then export a PDF and print it two-up on paper heavier than copier stock. The tool matters far less than those decisions. Here's the whole job, start to finish.

Most bad flyers are not badly designed. They’re badly decided. Someone opens a blank page, starts typing, and by the end there are four competing headlines, a paragraph of history nobody asked for, and the date in the same size as everything else. The design was never the problem.

So this guide runs in the order the job actually runs: size, hierarchy, content, tool, printing. If you only read two sections, read the first two.

Decide the size and how it will be distributed

Before you open anything, answer one question: how does this flyer reach a person? Pinned to a noticeboard, pressed into a hand, pushed through a letterbox, or posted online only? That answer sets the size, and the size sets your printing cost.

That third column is the whole economics of flyers. A print run is priced per sheet, not per flyer. Design at half-page and print two-up — two copies imposed on one sheet, then guillotined down the middle — and you have halved your cost without changing anything else. Quarter-page four-up quarters it. This is why the leaflets that come through your door are small: not taste, arithmetic.

The one place worth a full sheet is a noticeboard, where your flyer competes with thirty others and legibility from two metres away is the entire job.

Deciding between Letter and A4 mostly comes down to what your printer stocks — A4 is 210 × 297 mm and slightly taller and narrower, US Letter is 8.5 × 11 in and slightly shorter and wider. Our guide to A4 versus US Letter has the exact numbers and what breaks when a file crosses between them.

Set the page size and orientation at the very start. Changing it later means re-laying everything out, and re-laying out is how flyers end up with the date in 10 pt.

The three-second rule

A flyer gets read in about three seconds, at an angle, by someone walking past. That’s the design brief. Everything else follows from it.

Which means a flyer needs exactly three levels, in this order:

1. One dominant message. The thing that makes someone stop. Usually the event name or the offer — Summer Fair, Free Haircuts for Students, Lost Cat. Three to seven words. Big enough to read at arm’s length without leaning in, which in practice means very big: on a full-page flyer, a headline is often 48 to 72 pt, not 24.
2. The one detail that decides it. Almost always the date, the price, or the phone number. Pick one and make it visually second — clearly smaller than the headline, clearly larger than everything else. If two things are competing for second place, you have not decided what the flyer is for.
3. Everything else. Body text, no smaller than 11–12 pt. Below that it stops being readable on a noticeboard, and the person who most needs to read it is the person who won’t.

The test is simple and worth doing every time: print it, pin it on the wall, walk to the far side of the room and turn around. If you can’t tell what it’s for, the hierarchy is wrong. Not the colours. The hierarchy.

What to actually put on it

Five questions. A flyer that answers all five is finished; a flyer that answers four is broken.

• What is it? The headline does this.
• When is it? Day, date, and start time. Include the year only if the flyer will outlive the month.
• Where is it? Venue name plus enough street detail that a stranger can find it. “The Parish Hall” is not an address.
• How much does it cost? Say “Free” loudly if it’s free — it’s the single most persuasive word on most flyers. If there’s a price, say it. Silence on price reads as expensive.
• What do I do next? Turn up, call, book, scan. One action, stated as an instruction.

Then add a contact method — a phone number, an email, or a name people recognise — because someone always has a question the flyer doesn’t answer.

Add a QR code if there’s a booking page, a menu, or a map behind it. Make it at least 0.8 in / 20 mm square, leave a clear quiet zone around it, and put a two-word label underneath saying where it goes. An unlabelled QR code is a request for trust that most people decline.

And that’s it. Resist the history of the organisation, the committee list, and the second photo. If a line doesn’t serve one of the five questions or the contact detail, delete it.

Margins and bleed

Two rules, and the second one catches almost everyone the first time they use a print shop.

Keep text 0.5 in / 12 mm from every edge. Home printers can’t print to the paper edge at all, and trimming has a tolerance of a millimetre or two either way. Text closer than half an inch gets clipped, or looks clipped, which is nearly as bad.

If colour runs to the edge, you need bleed. A background colour or photo that goes right to the paper’s edge cannot simply stop at the edge in your file. Trimming is never perfectly registered, so the printer needs the artwork extended past the trim line — usually by 1/8 in (3 mm), sometimes 1/4 in — plus crop marks showing where to cut. Without that, a slight misalignment leaves a thin white sliver down one side of every copy.

If your tool can’t produce bleed and crop marks — and Word, Docs and PowerPoint can’t, not properly — design so nothing touches the edge. A white border of half an inch all round is a perfectly legitimate choice, and it’s what most flyers should do anyway.

Which tool should you actually use?

There is no single right answer here, only right-for-the-job. Here’s the honest version.

Microsoft Word

Everyone has it, so it’s where most flyers get made. It works, provided you fight one instinct: do not type into the page. Word’s body flow is built for documents that reflow, and a flyer is the opposite of that.

1. Start a blank document. Layout → Size → Letter or A4; Layout → Orientation → Portrait.
2. Layout → Margins → Custom, 0.5 in on all four sides.
3. For every block of text, Insert → Text Box → Draw Text Box. Headline in one, details in another, call to action in a third.
4. Select each box, then Shape Format → Shape Fill: No Fill and Shape Outline: No Outline. Otherwise you get white rectangles and hairlines in the PDF.
5. Insert → Pictures, then click the Layout Options button beside the image and choose In Front of Text or Behind Text. This is the single setting that stops pictures leaping to the next page when you edit.
6. Turn on View → Ruler and Gridlines. Select multiple boxes and use Shape Format → Align → Align Center / Distribute Vertically to get things straight.
7. File → Save As → PDF. Not Print to PDF, not .docx.

Where it breaks: text boxes nudge themselves when you edit nearby, there’s no bleed or crop marks, colour is RGB only, and imposing two-up means doing it by hand. Fine for a school fete. Frustrating for anything you’re paying a printer for.

Google Docs

Free, collaborative, and genuinely the weakest layout tool here — Docs is a word processor with almost no free placement. You can still get a decent flyer out of it:

1. File → Page setup, set Letter or A4 and margins of 0.5 in.
2. Insert → Drawing → + New for the headline and any grouped graphic elements. The drawing canvas is the only place in Docs where you can position things freely.
3. Insert → Image, then use the wrap options — Behind text or In front of text — to stop images shoving paragraphs around.
4. Use a borderless table (Insert → Table, then set border width to 0 pt) to get columns. It’s a hack, and it’s the most reliable one Docs offers.
5. File → Download → PDF Document (.pdf).

Honest alternative: Google Slides is a better Google tool for this. File → Page setup → Custom → 8.5 × 11 in, and you get a free-placement canvas with alignment guides, which is everything Docs lacks. Same price. Same account.

PowerPoint

Underrated for flyers, for one reason: it is a free-placement canvas that most people already know. Design → Slide Size → Custom Slide Size → 8.5 × 11 in, portrait. You get snapping guides, alignment tools, layering, and a familiar interface, then File → Export → Create PDF/XPS.

Where it breaks: no bleed, no crop marks, no CMYK, and it’s designed around screens, so image resolution needs watching. But for a free flyer made in twenty minutes, it beats Word.

Canva

Browser-based, thousands of flyer templates, and the fastest route from nothing to something that looks intentional. The trade-offs: it needs an account and an internet connection, a slice of the better templates and assets sit behind a subscription, and the popular templates are popular enough that people have seen your flyer before. Its print PDF export does handle bleed and crop marks, which puts it ahead of Word for print work. Our Korva vs Canva comparison covers the online-versus-desktop trade-off.

A page-layout app

This is what the category is for: precise placement in real units, master pages, proper margins and bleed, and PDF export built for printing. Scribus is free and does full prepress, with a steep learning curve. Affinity Publisher is very capable. Korva runs offline with no account, ships an Event Flyer template and lets a new user repeatedly export one complete project; Pro is a one-time US$49 rather than a subscription. Our desktop publishing guide compares the wider field.

The honest summary: if you make one flyer a year, use what you already have. If you make them monthly — a church, a venue, a shop — a layout app pays for itself in the hours you stop spending dragging text boxes back into place. The same logic applies to any recurring print job, which is the argument behind our guide to making a church bulletin.

Printing it

Export a PDF. Never hand a print shop a .docx or a Canva link. A PDF fixes the fonts, embeds the images and locks the positions, so what they open is what you saw. Handing over an editable document file means their copy of the fonts, their version of the app, and your layout quietly rearranging itself.

Impose it two-up or four-up. Either lay the sheet out with two copies of the half-page design on it, or export a single half-page PDF and use the print dialog’s 2 pages per sheet option. The first gives you control over the gutter; the second is faster. Either way, run one test sheet before committing to 500.

Use heavier paper. The cheapest upgrade available to you:

The difference between 80 gsm and 120 gsm costs very little per sheet and changes how the flyer feels in a hand entirely. People judge effort by weight.

Go grayscale to save money. Office copiers meter colour and mono separately, and the gap is often large. A well-designed grayscale flyer with strong contrast reads better on a noticeboard than a weak colour one anyway. Most tools offer a grayscale export — Korva’s PDF export, for example, has presets for “Screen & email”, “My own printer” and “Print shop”, plus a grayscale option and crop marks with a quarter-inch bleed margin when a print shop needs them.

How to make a flyer with tear-off tabs

Nobody explains the mechanics of this, so here they are. Tear-off tabs are the strip of repeated contact details along the bottom edge that people rip off and pocket — the classic lost-pet, room-to-let, guitar-lessons flyer.

The measurements. Tabs run along the bottom edge and are typically 0.75 to 1 in wide and 1.5 to 2 in tall. On an 8.5 in wide sheet with 0.25 in outer margins, you have 8 in of usable width, which divides cleanly into eight tabs of 1 in. On A4 (210 mm) with 6 mm margins, eight tabs of about 24 mm works.

The layout.

1. Rule a horizontal line across the page about 2 in up from the bottom edge. That’s your stop line — the cuts run up to it and no further, so the flyer stays in one piece.
2. Divide the strip below it into equal tabs with light vertical hairlines. These are cut guides; keep them thin and grey, or leave them out entirely and cut against a ruler.
3. In each tab, repeat the same thing: your phone number, or a QR code, or both if there’s room. Rotate the text 90 degrees so it reads down the length of the tab — that’s what gives you room for a full phone number in a one-inch column.
4. Add a two-word reminder inside each tab if the flyer’s purpose isn’t obvious from a phone number alone. “Dog walking — 555-0142” is a far more useful thing to find in a pocket than a bare number.

The cutting. Stack a few sheets, line a metal rule up with each cut guide, and draw a craft knife up to the stop line on a cutting mat. A guillotine is faster but won’t stop mid-cut, so with a guillotine you cut the tabs only after trimming, and carefully — most people find the knife more controllable for this one job. Then fan the tabs slightly with a thumb before pinning it up. A tab that’s visibly already loose gets taken; a flat, uncut-looking strip gets ignored.

Before you print, check these

• Does it pass the across-the-room test?
• Are all five questions answered — what, when, where, how much, what next?
• Is every phone number, URL and date correct? Read them aloud to someone else. This is the error that costs a whole print run.
• Is all text at least 0.5 in from the edges?
• If anything touches the edge, does the PDF have bleed and crop marks?
• Is body text 11 pt or larger?
• Have you printed one test copy on the actual paper?

That last one is not optional. Screens flatter everything.

A good flyer is mostly restraint: one message, five answers, big type, decent paper. The tool is the least interesting decision you’ll make — and if you’re making them regularly enough that Word has started to grate, download Korva and start from the Event Flyer template instead. If you’re specifically making things for a congregation, our roundup of free church bulletin templates covers fold sizes and margins that survive a church copier.

Microsoft, Microsoft Word and Microsoft Publisher are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation; Canva and Google Docs are trademarks of their respective owners; Korva is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.