Introduction
The design of your flyer is one of the most important elements that will affect the success of your campaigns.
Good targeting, timing and delivery are all crucial but without good design, you are unlikely to get optimal results. A bad design can easily make otherwise a perfectly good campaign unsuccessful.
General principles
In this article, we will spend a good amount of time discussing specific designs and what makes them work.
Before we do that, however, we should touch on some general principles that will be governing our thinking about leaflet design as a whole.
Simplicity
The most important thing, when it comes to leaflet design, is keeping things simple. This applies in terms of the message we are trying to convey, the goal of the design and the design itself.
Your flyers should have one dominating message they are trying to communicate.
If you want to let your potential customers know that your Italian restaurant now delivers food in their local area, at least 90% of your flyer should be focused on this message.
A great picture of your food, some information about how people can order and an example of your two most popular dishes is all you need.
Try to resist adding too many other ideas to your flyer. You can always run another campaign focused on a different part of your business.
High quality photography
Since we are keeping our flyer design simple, your photographs and/or illustrations become even more important.
Most modern flyers will have at least one side taken up by a photograph or a custom graphic.
To source photographs you can either use online stock photo platforms or have a professional photographer take custom pictures for you. (Unsplash and Pexels are two popular stock photo sources you can explore)
Consistent branding
It is crucial that the branding used on your flyers is consistent with your website, social media and other printed materials.
The colour scheme, logo and fonts that you choose for your flyers should be representative of what you use in the rest of your business. You don’t need to keep too strictly to every type of font and colour but it’s important that the general feel remains.
While you do this, make sure to take on board the feedback you’re getting from your designer. If he or she believes that you should use new or different design elements in your flyer, consider their points.
Restaurants flyer design
The largest change in restaurant flyer design over the last ten years has been the de facto disappearance of the leaflet menu.
As most takeaway orders now take place through an app or a website, there is relatively little to be gained from including a full list of dishes you offer on your flyer.
Your takeaway leaflets should focus more on explaining which type of cuisine you specialise in and what makes you unique.
Your customers will go to your website or app to order your food and as such your leaflet menu would serve little purpose.
RockIT Burger
Here you can see two flyers by RockIT burger in London. Clearly, they are focusing on showing fantastic images of their food and explaining the concept of their restaurant. Burgers with an Indian twist.
There is no question about what they do. If a customer wants to order their food, they will scan the QR code and see the whole menu in their delivery app of choice.
The usage of QR codes for takeaway flyers is a widespread technique that works. A simple QR code can save you having to include hard to read URLs on your flyer and
send people directly to your delivery app of choice.
TAKA
Here is a slightly different take on the same idea. The Taka sushi restaurant in London decided to go with their classy logo on the front side of their takeaway leaflet design.
They also describe what their restaurant specialises in and include a QR code to order. On the back side of the flyer, they show you a great picture of their food, more testimonials and another QR code.
This is a great example of a good restaurant leaflet. The design is clean and classy and it tells you exactly what the restaurant is about.
V&Me
V&Me run a slightly different food delivery service. They focus on delivering fresh and healthy food for toddlers.
The images they use make their focus very clear. All of the text on this leaflet design is aimed at explaining the service and the images are there to compliment that.
If you want to know more about food franchises and flyer deliveries you can visit our page dedicated to this topic.
Gym flyers
When designing your flyers, you should first try to identify the demographics you are targeting.
A martial arts gym will need to use very different design elements to a pilates studio.
When you identify the types of clients you want to be reaching, you can have a better understanding of which types of images you should be using.
Similar to takeaway leaflet designs, you want to focus on explaining the concept of your gym first.
Try to aim every element of your flyer in this direction. Your text, colour scheme and images should all be delivering one message. Whether your focus is crossfit, yoga, pilates or MMA.
Retra Fitness
Here is a great example of this. Retra Fitness in London specialises in HIIT classes. They run a continuous HIIT class that people can jump into at any time of day.
Their colour scheme, logo and image choice show a youthful and mixed environment. There are very few words on this flyer and the term HIIT is mentioned multiple times.
After looking at this flyer, there is no question about what Retra Fitness do. It’s a great example of gym leaflet design.
We discuss more details about this topic on our Gym flyer delivery page.
School and tutoring flyer design
There are many different types of tutoring businesses and schools out there.
If you are running one of these and are looking at designing a flyer, the first thing you need to think about is – how can your flyer explain what you do in one glance?
Using good quality photographs is, again, the best way of doing this.
If you are mostly focused on children, use a picture of a child. If you focus on adult learning make sure that your photos reflect this.
Online Super Tutors
Online Super Tutors focus on both of these demographics. The way they chose to communicate this is by dedicating each side of the flyer to one of these groups.
The important thing to point out here is the fact, that both the text and the images on each side are clearly communicating a single message.
One large headline, a subheadline, a quality image and contact details is all that is needed.
By splitting the flyer into two sides that are each devoted to a separate audience, Online Super Tutors managed to keep things simple while communicating to a wide range of potential customers.
Household services and Law companies
In this section, we’ll have a look at two flyers that each offer a fairly unique service and talk about why they are examples of good leaflet design.
Maison Plan
Maison Plan are high-end handymen. They specialise in managing whole households and can handle anything that could possibly go wrong inside a home.
They decided to use an illustration rather than a photograph for their flyer. They’ve done a great job with this and kept the flyer very clean.
This choice allowed for more space to be used for text explaining exactly what they do using bullet points.
If they used photographs as well as this amount of text on one side of the flyer, the result would likely be more cluttered and difficult to read.
Thanks to the great illustration Maison Plan chose, they’ve managed to keep their leaflets clear while delivering a lot of information to their potential customers.
Hazelhurst Solicitors
The last design we are going to discuss today is also the simplest. Hazelhurst Solicitors provide a wide range of legal services related to immigration.
They chose to use only text and very basic design elements on their flyer. The goal here was to keep everything looking professional and purely informative.
This approach works very well for their kind of business.
As you can see even though most types of flyers benefit greatly from large high quality photographs, that doesn’t mean that this approach is right for everyone.
If you are looking to book a flyer delivery campaign in London feel free toget in touch with us here. At The Private Postman we can help you with your leaflet distribution as well as design.
