How to make a business flyer using these 50 modern examples

Flyers, though rather traditional, are great tools for advertising. Whether you're promoting a fundraiser or launching a new bricks-and-mortar store, when designed effectively, printed flyers can be a great marketing resource. Read on for tips on how to make a business flyer, and 50 beautifully designed flyers to help you get inspired.

While many marketing teams focus their energy and resources on digital marketing, the saturated nature of social media can make it hard for your brand or business to be seen.

The flyer is perhaps an old-world marketing relic, but it’s drastically underestimated. And it shouldn’t be. Think about it:How many times have you been distracted by a bright piece of paper stapled to a telephone pole?

In this article, we show you how to make a business flyer from scratch. And we also feature 50 incredible and modern flyer examples to inspire you and teach you how to make a business flyer of your own.

When your marketing efforts have a clear purpose, they are more likely to reach the right people. Designing flyers are no different.

As you brainstorm ideas for your flyer, ask yourself:How does this piece of communication support your business goals? How does it align with your overall business mission? What do you want people to know, learn or believe in?

Some examples of key marketing objectives can include:

1. Promoting a new product or service
2. Growing your digital audience
3. Lead generation
4. Reaching new customers
5. Retaining existing customers
6. Building brand awareness
7. Increasing brand loyalty
8. Growing sales and revenue
9. Expanding into a new market
10. Establishing market authority

By adopting some project management strategies, flyers can prove to fit in as a jigsaw puzzle piece into your overall communications and marketing strategy.

Step 1:Do your research

All communication sets itself up for success when it strives to be clear, useful and friendly. Usually in the very early stages of a project, however, there are many things that are undefined. This is where research can come to the rescue. Figure out what your customers want and need—based on their pain points. From there, write down your short- and long-term goals for the project. Keep your thoughts organized with a note-taking system. This research will help inform how flyers can help you get your message across.

Step 2:Clarify the goal of your business flyer

Establish why your project matters, what you’re going to design, and what you want your content to do. Set a timeframe for achieving these goals

Step 3:Get creating

After defining what you want to say, it’s time to get designing. Try a few different variations to see what might work best. Play with words and phrases, fonts and color combinations, images and grid styles. To get early feedback, show early drafts to co-workers and subject matter experts to establish a feedback loop. This will help you reach the best version of your business-related flyer that’s fit for your intended purpose.

Step 4:Refine, polish and publish

When you achieve a final draft, it’s time to publish. Think of this less as a hard deadline, and more as a way to let go of the content and learn from how your customers respond to it.

Your customers and team are your biggest advocates for feedback, who will help you continuously improve. Use their insights to produce preferred designs, checklists or branding style guidelines that’ll help you professionalize your visual design and branding processes for consistency and best practice.

Take, for example, the visual branding of athleisure brand Outdoor Voices, who has a clothing and accessories product line that successfully blends activewear with everyday fashion.

By figuring out what makes them different and marketing themselves as technical apparel, they’ve built a cult following around the message of #doingthings, which shows up in their messaging consistent across all platforms and media.

Create a beautiful, bold action-oriented marketing campaign flyer with the Red Black Friday Discount Flyer template and the Retail Flash Sale A4 Flyer template.

Your audience is the main reason your business exists. But who are they, really? Before you commit to making a flyer, take the time to define who you’re really trying to reach.

Consider how your business exists beyond the products and services it wants to promote. What kind of community does it want to connect to? Who are your regular customers? Who are the customers you’re trying to reach who don’t know you exist yet? Consider the demographics or personal attributes they have in common (or identify as a point of difference).

The team at marketing product company CoSchedule define it as your ‘content core’, understanding the overlap between what you do (the problem which you exist to solve), and what you need to talk about (the benefits and features that an audience will find useful).

Thinking about your audience as you design helps you picture them as real people, and co-creators in the communications you’ll be using to reach them.

Here are a couple of questions worth asking as you try to pinpoint what audience your flyer will be reaching:

• What problems are my products or services solving? This helps you keep your messaging relevant and timely—essentially asking, ‘why does someone need this in their lives right now?’
• Who are our customers? You can use this information to build out audience personas, figure out where in the marketing funnel they may currently be, and create segments based on shared qualities they have.
• Who’s our competition? A quick search on Google will help you figure out who else on the market is offering something similar. By identifying their branding, keywords, and tactics, you can avoid copy cat syndrome to instead craft something contextual for your customer.
• What do our customers gain from choosing us (over our competitor)? Identify your Unique Selling Point—the thing that makes your service or product better than anything else on the market, and tell your customers.

Create friendly, fun and fresh promo flyers with the Purple Flowers and Eggs Easter Flyer template and the Beige Illustration Volunteer Flyer template.

After scanning your flyer, your customer should know exactly what you’d like them to do.

You don’t need multiple calls-to-action:Instead, pick one, stick to it, and make sure it correlates with your current marketing strategy.

Your call-to-action should also be supported by follow-up information. Want them to make a purchase? Tell them where your store is located. Register for an event? Don’t forget to include the sign-up link. Make a phone call? Leave your number. Write a review? Include your website details.

In the example below, the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival in Australia encourages patrons to make bookings which are essential—and provides both an email and phone number to follow up with.

Create sleek, professional flyers that encourage action with the Basketball Viewing Party Flyer template and the Yellow Bold Text Tutor Flyer template.

Whether you’re going for something offbeat or perhaps a little more minimalist, it’s important to make sure your flyer looks inviting (even from a distance) and is easy to read.

Think of your visuals as bridging the gap between different pieces of information and communicating what’s unspoken:A vibe, expectation, feeling, or look.

Your decisions around choosing the right images will be shaped by your brand, the industry you’re in, and the audience you’re looking to reach. For example, community broadcaster Triple R made one of the flyers for their annual subscription drive resemble a schlocky horror movie poster.

The end result combined humor, nostalgia and striking visuals and an eye-catching primary color scheme to encourage local listeners to ring in and support their local station.

Here are a couple of other things to keep in mind about the balance of visuals and copy on your template:

• Large chunks of text make your information difficult to read. Break up your copy with images or visuals whenever possible.
• Use different font colors to show information hierarchy. Headings, subtitles, and body copy should all be easy to tell apart from one another in a first glance.
• Arrange your information so it flows logically for your reader. Thin about what information is need-to-know versus nice-to-keep-in-mind?

Create a visually exciting and memorable promotional flyers with the Vegetable Party Flyer template and the Pink, Blue, Yellow Colorful CMYK Collage Creative Modern Fashion Event Flyer template.

With limited space to communicate, your word choices need to find a balance between being precise and direct without sacrificing tone-of-voice, style, and the ability to encourage a customer to follow through.

These should all either be answered in the flyer information, or your customers should be able to navigate easily to a website or social media platform to gain the full details.

When it comes to what the copy will look like, limit yourself to two fonts:one for the headers and one for the body text. Bullet points, numbered lists, or other hierarchical text formats will also help you communicate important information.

For inspiration, let’s take a look at the Melbourne International Film Festival’s visual branding, which changes every year depending on the festival theme.

A key part of such an audience-driven event is that the experience of the festival program extends beyond the daily screenings. It’s about the conversations that happen after you walk out of the cinema, too.

So rather than explain what the Festival is, the flyer copy here communicates the experience we might be missing out on—coupled with a promise for what will happen when we book tickets.

The combination of copy and design decisions made here aims to sparks interest, stimulate the senses, and invite the public to engage further by navigating to the organization’s website.

Design striking flyers that make the most of your words with the Yellow Paint Brush Sketch Educational Art Flyer template and the Midnight Blue Pink Boombox Dance Flyer template.

Proofread and check alignment

You’ve worked hard on designing your business flyer—let’s make sure tiny errors like typos don’t undo your efforts and goals ahead for business success.

Experiment with different proofreading tactics until you find one that works for you. It’s about keeping your processes systematic as that you’re able to confidently catch as many errors as possible in the least amount of time.

In the rush to export your flyer design or get it printed, we’re often prone to mistakes happening at the last minute.

Whether you want to print your designs at home, or use Canva Print to get physical copies delivered to your door, it’s worth making sure you know your flyer sizes to suit your intended purpose and audience.

The most common flyer sizes tend to be:

• Half sheet - Often chosen for being cost effective to print.
• Standard - The industry standard for flyer sizes.
• Large format - Best suited for documents that need to be folded. Think menus, broadsheet inserts, and oversized leaflets, among other types of material.

This flyer design by designer Marta Veludo takes a playful approach with its typography. The brand, Chocolate Rocks, is shown in a staggered, unorthodox way. The roughness of the placement of the text pairs well with the roughness of the actual product being shown and helps to fill up the space.

Interested in other ways to utilize unique typography? Check out these 10 tips for typography design.

Mix and match type, like with the Classic Surf Shop Promotional Flyer template.

Villa Studio took a fun approach to color with this flyer. Instead of having a universally colored flyer, different colors were applied to give each flyer its own unique personality. If the flyers were just, say, purple, they’d still look nice—but some of the specialized uniqueness would be lost. The flyers wouldn’t have been as fun, and therefore not as spectacularly effective.

DesignerGraphéine used overlap and transparency to give this flyer its unique appearance. The combination of the circular graphics fading into the photographs paired with the pop of gold against the subtle black and white imagery really provides a modern, yet classy feeling. The fade not only serves to reveal the imagery beneath, but to help break up what could have turned into an overwhelmingly solid graphic.

The black and white 3D blocks created by designerAleš Brce in this design provide a nice contrast against the bright yellow pop of color found on both the front and back of this flyer. They not only provide nice imagery but also relate to the flyer’s purpose. They’re Tetris blocks, and the flyer is for Tetris.

Using shapes, like here with the Black and White Geometric Shapes Creative Fashion Show Flyer template, creates an interesting look.

DesignerEugenia Anselmo created this flyer for New York Fashion week. The typeface and manipulation of the typeface that she used creates an interesting image all on its own. It really gives this flyer an all too appropriate, high-fashion feel, and it pairs perfectly with the accent fonts used alongside it.

Read this article to learn more about combining fonts.

This flyer byAndrew from theOnion Design Associates utilizes die cuts. The cuts allow the viewer to see the texture of whatever is behind the flyer, and that adds in a fun twist. This allows the flyer to truly become a part of its environment and ties it into wherever it may happen to be.

Miguel Dias designed this flyer in a fun and unique way. He’s drawing attention to the idea of making mistakes, and how mistakes make you ‘cooler’. The graphic is almost representative of a fingerprint, and the red dot is what makes the fingerprint (along with the flyer) unique.

Make your flyer fun with the Cartoon Cats A4 Flyer template.

Design studio Moby Digg broke up the design plane in this flyer. They could have easily kept the circular graphic intact, but breaking it up provides a much-needed contrast against the black background. The pop of turquoise also contrasts the black, and ties in the rainbow of color in the graphic.

DesignerSaxon Campbell created an interesting dimension in this poster. The way the type and the image interact with each other helps to provide a depth of space, and the two quickly become one in this composition.

Peter Ørntoft used a pretty strict grid on the back of this flyer, and for good reason. The information is laid out in a clean and effective way that’s easy to read and understand. A flyer’s ultimate purpose is to relay information, and this flyer does that perfectly.

Canva has pre-made grids that let you create templates like the Blue Green Red Music Icons Open Mic Night Flyer template.

Umberto Daina took a totally unique approach when creating this flyer. The minimal strips of white offset certain points of the text, and the soft color palette offsets the harshness of that divide. The textbox turned on its side adds in an unexpected element, and allows all of the words to fit on a single line to create a clean look.

DesignerBrando Corradini broke the grid in this flyer design. The type is staggered in a way that is interesting to look at visually, yet still entirely legible. It’s important to know that you need to understand how to design within a grid before you should break it, that way you are still designing effectively.

Want to learn more about grid design?

Play around with your design's layout with the Enticing Free Cookie Flyer template.

Design studioHappyending Studio used a nice pop of highlighter pink in this flyer. It draws attention to the important parts of the flyer, and adds in a nice contrast against the subtle white background.

DesignersDan Matutina,Joanna Malinis,Raxenne Maniquiz, and design studioPlus63 Design Co. created a nice illustrative border for this flyer. It works well on both the black and white background and provides a nice, empty area for the text to sit it.

Illustrated borders create an interesting look, just like with the Red Floral Mothers' Day Sale Promo Flyer template.

Patric Dreier combined type, texture, and illustration in this flyer. Multiple levels of dimension can be seen here, and the different colors work together to create a harmonious color palette. The combination of illustrative photographs and the simple background work nicely together, and help to achieve balance.

A limited color palette of black, grey, and white were utilized in this flyer created byTuper Oir. Limiting yourself to a particular range of colors is always challenging, but ends up producing a harmony that can’t be achieved when you incorporate as many colors as you wish. It’s a great exercise for designers looking to not only improve their design skills, but their color skills.

Working with only two colors, the Blue and Pink Geometric Bake Sale Flyer template gives off a calm vibe.

This flyer byRachel Denti incorporates fun illustration. From the character to the typography, everything has a hand-drawn quality to it. The handmade feel of the flyer gives it a more personal, relatable appearance, and really makes it stand out against other flyers you may see.Illustrations, like here with the Peachpuff Vintage Illustrations Yard Sale Flyer template, gives a new and interesting layer to designs.

This flyer byORFEO LANZ takes a fun and interesting approach in laying out its type. Certain text boxes are laid on their sides in order to allow them to fit nicer into the composition, as well as adds in a nice element to the layout.

DesignerAkira Kusaka uses a beautiful texture in this background. The texture not only adds in a nice dimension to the illustration, but also helps provide some depth for the solid gray background color and creates some contrast.

Photographs work great in creating textured backgrounds, just like with the Wood Planks Dinner Party Invitation template.

This flyer byRome Creation really provides a pop of New Year’s glitz. The sparkling accents and lens flare-like graphics really make the type stand out against the background, and creates a feeling of celebration. It gives the promise of a good time and is very effective in visualizing fun New Year’s Eve festivities.

This flyer by designerORFEO LANZ isn’t just designed effectively visually, but also on a level of interaction. The way this flyer is folded and presented to viewers involves them in the process of not just viewing it, but opening it. People are tactile, and this presentation helps involve our tactile senses – making this flyer all the more enjoyable.

This flyer designed byАlbina Zaripova shows that flyers don’t have to be presented poster style. Folding them up similar to a brochure allows you to treat each fold as its own space, and design it as such. The areas can be looked at individually, or together – it’s entirely up to how you want to design it.

The Red Photo Travel Trifold Brochure offers

This flyer by designersRaewyn Brandon,Matias Corea, andJocelyn K. Glei takes the folding of the previous flyer to another level. This flyer is almost book-like, and folds out to reveal the entire message. It incorporates user experience into its design, and makes it incredibly effective.

DesignerShinyoung Kim uses iconography in this flyer. The icons are simple, yet bright and colorful – perfectly complementing the bright and colorful typography. The icons add in a nice element to the background that wouldn’t be achieved by any other image.

Use icons to provide a uniform imagery, like with the Brown Icons Yard Sale Flyer template.

DesignersUmer Ahmed andHaider Ahmad took a fun approach with their typography. The letters almost turn into an illustration and add a nice texture to the flyer. The type benefits from the simple background, and allows it to truly shine.

Related:Discover different kinds of business flyers in the Canva library from house flyers for real-estate to anything that falls under the business category.

DesignersEniko Deri andNora Demeczky layered text over their graphic. The simple outlined text allows the graphic to peek through, and the layering of the two introduces a new color to the composition, which can also be seen on the back, tying everything together.

TITLE

Ruworks created this flyer with a number of interesting factors. The color palette is limited, and the illustration is graphic and stylized. The stylization of the imagery adds in a unique feature that may otherwise be lacking had the illustration been more realistic. This flyer is fun and full of energy, just like turning tables.

TITLE

DesignerPaul Bouvier took a simple yet effective approach to this flyer. The white helps to offset the vibrant red, and the sans serif typeface helps to keep everything simple and clean. The text is centralized on both the front and the back, further solidifying the theme of simplicity.

TITLE

DesignerMaïa Faddoul organized all of the information in this flyer in a very simple and clean way. There’s a magnitude of information here, yet it is clearly separated into different chunks to make it not only easier to read and absorb, but to work together as a composition.

Josue Roca Calderon kept it simple with this flyer. It’s mostly white, but the pop of the yellow and green graphic adds in a nice twist. The type is simple and clean, yet has its own special flair to it with the circular accents.

Keep things simple to get your point across. Check out the Pink Blood Volunteer Flyer template.

Gabriel Jasmin used collage in this flyer, and it’s very interesting. Sure, they could have achieved a similar effect on a computer, but the tactile and hand created feeling this flyer has makes it truly special. There’s something really nice about the small imperfections in the collage, and those would be missed had this flyer been strictly computer generated.

Asuka Watanabe uses intense and vibrant color in this flyer. The way the illustration is set up allows the colors to have their own space, and if this illustration was more detailed, the color could get too overwhelming. It achieves a nice balance, and the colors really stand out.

Michele di Modugno uses patterns in this nicely designed flyer. The patterns are simple and subtle, yet add in a nice texture to the background. If the patterns weren’t there, the design would fall a bit flat and not be as effective.

This flyer created byCamille Foucou has a lot going on – and it’s great. Type and numerous graphics come together to create a flyer that is full of motion. It would be easy to create something too overwhelming when designing with this many elements, but the careful attention to detail makes this flyer a success.

Don't be afraid to use bold patterns and colors, like with the Colorful Blocks Fashion Show Flyer template.

DesignerJean-Michel Verbeeck added in a very subtle texture to the background of these flyers. The texture gives the paper an almost marble-like appearance, and helps to ground the text. Without the texture, the type would be sitting on a plain background and may feel as though it was floating.

DesignersFederico Landini andJonathan Calugi used a lot of color in this flyer—but in a limited way. Instead of overwhelming the entire flyer with the colorful illustration, they limited it to the top portion and kept the bottom very simple. This helps achieve balance, and provides an area for the text to reside and be legible.

DesignerMaurizio Pagnozzi used an interesting typeface as the star in this flyer. The typeface suits the point of the flyer nicely, an electronic music festival, and provides a taste of the kind of music you’d be experiencing at this festival. Had the designer used another typeface, the message wouldn’t have been communicated so clearly.

Unique typefaces can become a focal point of your design. Check out the Red Illustrated Microphone Talent Show Flyer template.

This flyer byMoses Maalouf ofRat’s Nest is incredibly detailed. The illustrations are beautiful and intricate, the background is riddled with color and texture, and the typeface is unique and interesting. The amount of detail in this flyer could be overwhelming, but it was handled so carefully that it becomes something truly decadent.

DesignerMarko Rop draws attention to this flyer through fun and energetic illustration. The rest of the flyer itself is very simple, but it pairs perfectly with the brightly colored toucan. You’re drawn in by the illustration, then you read the message.

The flat graphics in this flyer created byAsuka Watanabe work nicely in this piece. The flatness of the illustration allows the color to shine through, and doesn’t over complicate the composition. It has a perfect balance between graphic and illustration, and isn’t too overly rendered.

Beige with Musical Notes Illustration Volunteer Flyer

This flyer by ma. mind is pretty unique. From the illustration to the typography, it has an edgy vibe to it. The focus is centralized on the illustration – not just because it’s in the center, but because it’s the only source of color. The centrally located focus ensures you look at everything around it, and that no piece of information is missed.

Res Zinniker took a chance with color in this flyer and it paid off. The color palette is incredibly limited, and so much so that a lot of differentiation between each element is done with subtle linework and shading. It’s very effective, and a nice refresher from flyers that use too much color or not enough.

Designers Markus Koeltringer and Michael Huebler broke the rules when designing this flyer. They broke up words to better suit the design, and it worked really well. You can still clearly read what the flyer says, but if the text wasn’t broken up or smaller in size, it wouldn’t work as well. The placement of the text not only works well for the design, but adds in an element of fun to the flyer as well.

Text doesn't need to be all together. Break it up, like with the Yellow Bold Text Talent Show Flyer template, for an interesting look.

DesignersDanilo De Marco,Alessandro Zappalà,Christophe Rose and design studioMeedori Studio created fun frames in their flyer. The frames add in an element of imagery and color, and also serve to box in the important focal text. They help to break up the space of the page, as well as add in more visual interest to the flyer.

Mark Bridgwater used high-quality photography in this flyer—and for good reason. If you’re going to make a flyer about a product, it’s smart to show that product. Viewers can then see exactly what it is their reading about, nd will be able to recognize it when they’re out and about. They may even pick it up if you’re flyer is effective enough.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and having high-quality one on on your design can create a huge impact. Look at the Orange Modern Simple Advertising Flyer template for inspiration.

DesignerAriane Grigoletto created a subtle pattern in the background of this flyer using icons. The icons are comprised of different things you’d see in a pizzeria, and act to help break up the monotony of the plain background color. The icons themselves don’t stand out an incredible amount, but they do just enough, and add in a nice playfulness and liveliness to the flyer.

Simply repeating an icon creates an interesting and unique pattern for your design, just like with the Blue and Yellow Megaphone Cheer Tryouts Sports Flyer template.

Zarreen Harris took a creative approach to this flyer. He broke up the background image using linear graphics and geometric shapes. Had he not broken up the image, the flyer could have easily appeared too flat and two-dimensional, but the incorporation of the transparent lines and graphics add in much-needed depth and washes of color.

This flyer created byDolores Oliver has a lovely, personal feel to it. The letters look as though they’ve been drawn out by hand, and that adds in a nice human quality to the flyer. That human quality makes this flyer feel more authentic, and is, therefore, more relatable to viewers.

Handwritten fonts can go a long way to giving a design like the Church Sermon Pastor Flyer a hand-written feel.

DesignersNayane Nathalie andCristiane Amaral managed to create nice depth perception in this flyer. They layered different graphics in different areas on the page in a way that gives a true dimension to the flyer. It doesn’t feel as if it’s just a flat, two-dimensional piece – it has weight and character to it.

DesignersLauren Sheldon andMeg Paradise along withParliament of Owls studio created this helpful and informative flyer. It contains a map inside of it that is clearly labeled and easy to read. Useful information, whether it be a map, product information, or details about an event gives your flyer a purpose – and people will be more likely to hold onto your flyer and actually use it rather than toss it in the trash.