What Flyers Are, the Types That Work, and How to Print Them

A flyer is a single sheet, printed on one or both sides, with no fold. That is the entire definition, and every other format in this family is a variation on it.

Leaflet is the same object under a British name. Walk into a print shop in Manchester and ask for flyers and you will get leaflets, at the same price, in the same sizes. Where the two words drift apart it is about weight rather than shape: leaflet tends to describe the light text weight sheet that comes through a letterbox, flyer the slightly heavier thing somebody puts in your hand. No printer quotes them differently.

The real divide is the fold. Add one and the sheet becomes a brochure with panels, a reading order and a bindery pass on the invoice. Add stitching and it becomes a booklet with pages.

The trade-off is simple and people get it wrong in one direction. A flyer that has been crammed with four topics wanted to be a brochure, and a brochure with three near empty panels wanted to be a flyer. Count your messages before you count your panels. If you are genuinely undecided, the format comparison guide walks the same decision with page counts attached, and you can price both against each other with standard flyers and standard brochures open in two tabs.

A flyer wins on two things: space and control of the handoff. It gives you a full sheet for a menu, a schedule or a price grid, and you decide who receives it. It loses the moment the piece has to travel on its own.

Here is the rule people trip over. You cannot put a flyer in a mailbox. Under 18 U.S.C. 1725 the mailbox is US Postal Service property and anything deposited in it needs postage, so hand delivery means the door, the doorknob, a windshield where local ordinance allows it, or a counter. If you want the piece to arrive by mail, it has to be mailed properly.

That pushes you toward one of two formats. A standard postcard starts at $16.48, needs no envelope, and carries postcard postage, which is why direct mail campaigns default to it. The postcard mailing layout guide covers the address block and the clear zone the USPS requires. Alternatively, mail the flyer itself through Every Door Direct Mail, but only if it qualifies as a flat: the piece has to exceed at least one of 6.125 inches high, 11.5 inches long, or 0.25 inch thick. An 8.5 by 11 flyer clears that on height. A 5.5 by 8.5 half sheet clears none of the three and cannot go EDDM at all.

For residential delivery without postage, door hangers are the honest alternative, since they hang on the knob rather than going anywhere near the mailbox. And when the piece never has to be carried at all, print a poster instead: an 11 by 17 or larger sheet on a wall does a job no handout can, because it is read at distance by people who never asked for it.

A flyer has about two seconds to earn a third one. Everything below is aimed at those two seconds, or at surviving the guillotine that trims the stack.

Build the file with both dashed lines. Background art extends 0.125 inch past the trim on every edge, and every word, logo and QR code stops 0.125 inch inside it. Cutting stacks of paper moves by a hair, and a phone number sitting on the trim line will lose its last digit on part of the run. Bleed and trim explained shows what that looks like in the file, and the blank template library gives you the guides already drawn at the right size.

One offer, one action. A flyer with three calls to action gets none of them. Decide what the reader should do, put it in the bottom third where the hand holds the sheet, and let everything above it justify that one action.

Size type for the distance. A handout is read at arm length, so 9 or 10 point body copy is fine and 8 point is the floor. A posted 11 by 17 is read at six feet, which means the headline needs to be around 60 point or larger and the body copy needs to be short enough that nobody has to walk closer. Weight matters as much as size, and the flyer font guide covers which faces hold up small.

Two specifics that quietly ruin flyers. First, large solid black areas should be built as rich black, roughly 60 cyan, 40 magenta, 40 yellow and 100 black, not 100 black alone, which prints as a washed grey once it covers half a page. Second, do not reverse small type out of a four color background: registration shifts by a fraction and the white letters fill in. Reverse out of a single solid color, or print the type dark on a light panel.

Make the QR code big enough. 0.8 inch square is the practical minimum, with a clear margin around it, and it should point at a page that works on a phone. A QR code printed at half an inch on a gloss coating under a bar light will not scan, and you will never find out that it did not.