HOW TO CREATE AN OUTSTANDING FLYER FOR YOUR MARKETING CAMPAIGN

Shalom Solomon 12th November, 2021

Marketing and advertising in themselves have been made incredibly easy for businesses these days.

With the creation of brilliant software applications for graphic designs, business owners can now create their own flyers without the paying for the services of a graphic designer.

There are design applications for both mobile and desktop computer devices.

As an entrepreneur, designing your flyer yourself, offers you various benefits such as:

The opportunity to tell your story yourself.
Allows you to reach your target market.
Reduces the cost of advertising your business.
Creates awareness for your business, products or services.

While designing your flyer ads yourself has innumerable benefits, if you do not design them right, you might end up losing at the end. Your efforts and time will be wasted if your flyers fail to produce the results you intend to achieve in the first place. Your flyer should catch the attention of your target customer and also pass the message you want to be passed be it advertising of products, creating awareness for your brand or even invitation for sales or events.

The big question then is, how do you create or design outstanding flyers to meet your marketing needs? The answer is simply, the proper application of design principles. Graphic designing like almost all life concepts is governed by certain principles or guidelines that ensure success when followed. Flyers are products of graphic designs and as such they must be created based on design principles to achieve the best results.

Photo Credit: iStock

We would look at the top design principles below and how to apply them to designing your flyer ads for marketing

1. Colour:

Colour is the one of the most important if not the most important design element of all. Colour is the soul of your flyer, it gives your design a personality, emotions. This is so because colours draw certain emotions when a person sees them; for instance, red is associated with passion, emergency, etc. flyers ads for urgent sales can use splashes of red to match the message being passed. In the same way, flyers for fun events can use fun colours along with images to give the viewer a glimpse of what the event will be like.

2. Whitespace:

Whitespace in graphic design is simply the space on a design or your flyer without text, graphics, images or blocks. Sometimes called blank space or negative space, whitespace is as important as the content of the page itself.

Now, I know it is quite tempting to cram as much information as you can on your design; in fact, cramming a lot of information without spacing allows you to put more content on your flyer.

The issue with designing this way, it that, it disrupts the flow of information on your design. Your flyer will become too noisy and viewers might find it difficult to find a spot to place their focus on.

Creatively using whitespace will give your design breathing space and people viewing your flyer will have time to absorb one piece of information before moving to the next item on your flyer.

3. Contrast:

Using colour and contrast creatively, brings out the true beauty of your work. Contrast does not only lie in use of colours, it can be applied in the arrangement of other design elements such as the text on your flyer.

Where you use heavy fonts with dark colours, your background should have bright colours in order to make your flyer pop.

4. Emphasis/Hierarchy:

The principle of hierarchy is vital for determining the flow of information on your flyer design. The concept behind hierarchy is simply organizing the weight, position and colour of text on your flyer based on their degree of importance to your overall message.

On a sales flyer for instance, Bonanza or October sales for instance would be written in bold, heavier fonts. This is to ensure that once anyone sees your flyer, the first thing theyâ€™d read is the bolder/bigger text.

5. Balance and Alignment:

Balance and alignment go hand in hand with other design principles to ensure the legibility of your design. A flyer with a well balanced and aligned design will ensure that the design elements are evenly distributed.

Your text for instance should be arranged based on a specific pattern. The idea behind balance and alignment makes sure every block of text or design elements are aligned in a certain direction.

7. Repetition:

The rule of repetition revolves around applying consistency in the design elements used on your flyer. It simply means there should be a structured consistency in the use design elements be it colours, the style of text used, the tone of your design, the feeling/emotion it evokes, etc.

Applying the principle of repetition:

Improves legibility
Helps with the flow of information
Gives uniformity to your work
Makes your flyer wholesome

Above all, it helps with consistency which would consequently improve the memorability of your flyer. This is why startups are advised to consistently use their brand elements across all their platforms be it corporate or marketing.