Introduction
The design of your flyer is one of the most important elements in the success of your campaign.
Good targeting, timing and delivery are all crucial but without good design you will never get optimal results. A bad design can easily sink an otherwise perfectly good campaign.
General principles
We will spend a good amount of time discussing specific designs and talking about what makes them work.
Before we do that however we should have a look at some of the general principles that will be governing our thinking about leaflet design in all cases.
Simplicity
The most important principle we need to keep in mind is simplicity. 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 main message they are trying to deliver. If you have a sale on a specific service happening, at least 90% of your flyer should be dedicated to this.
If you want to let everyone know that your Italian restaurant now delivers food in their area, focus on this message only. A great picture of your food plus information about how people can order is all you need. There is nothing to be gained from adding a large menu or anything else.
High quality photography
Since we are keeping our flyer design simple, your photographs and/or illustrations become 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 the two most popular free stock photo sources)
In this we include illustrations and graphics since some brands and companies prefer to use custom illustrators to using photos.
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 have some relation to 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 that you take on board input from the designer who is making your flyer as well. If he or she believes that you should use new 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 no 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.
With that 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 focused on explaining the service and the image used couldn’t be more clear.
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 the flyers you should first clearly identify the demographics you are targeting.
A powerlifting gym will need to use very different design elements to a pilates studio.
When you carefully identify the types of clients you want to be talking to make sure that the images you use reflect this.
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 powerlifting, 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 word HIIT is mentioned multiple times.
There is no question about what Retra Fitness is about after looking at this flyer. It’s a great example of gym leaflet design.
We discuss more details about this topic on our Gym flyer delievry 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 do you make 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 solved this is by dedicating each side of the flyer to one of these groups.
The important thing to point out here again 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
Sometimes your business will not fit into a larger category we could discuss using general terms. 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 gave them more space to use text to explain exactly what they do in bullet points.
If they used photographs as well as this amount of text on one side of the flyer the result would likely be cluttered and difficult to read.
Thanks to the great illustration they chose they’ve managed to keep things 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.
At The Private Postman we offer free design consultations to all our clients. We can either design your flyers from scratch or offer pointers for your own designs.
If you are looking to start designing your flyers get in touch with us here and we can help you think through the right approach.
