Creating Posters and Flyers
Contributed by Chris Hampton, Edited by Chris Hampton 

Copyright:Community Toolbox 

• What are posters and fliers?    
• How to create your poster or flier    
• A few basic tips on poster design    
• Mistakes to avoid

You're on the bus, sleepily persevering through your daily trip to work. For what seems like the thousandth time you look up at the poster from a local G.E.D. training program. "Maybe if I got my G.E.D.," you think to yourself, "I could start taking some classes at the community college and get out of this factory job?" You pull a pencil and paper out of your purse and write down the number on the poster. 

or 

You're at a coffee shop with a friend. On your way out the door, you pass by the crowded bulletin board covered with fliers about local event. Then you notice one lone, colorful flyer with a funny cartoon of a dog on it tacked to a telephone pole just outside the coffee shop. "Check this out," says your friend, stopping to read. "The Humane Society is having a battle of the bands fundraiser this Friday! Want to go?" 

or 

You're having a party for your daughter's eighth birthday. While you're cleaning up the cake crumbs and paper plates in the dining room, the kids are playing outside. You hear a commotion and go running out into the yard, where your daughter's friend Timmy is sitting on the ground looking a bit dazed but otherwise okay, with a large burn mark on the front of his t-shirt. He confesses that he took the matches you'd used to light the cake and, while playing with them in the yard, set his shirt on fire. Luckily, some of the other kids remembered the "Stop, Drop, and Roll" poster hanging in their classroom at school and helped him put the fire out right away. 

These are all examples of the ways that posters and flyers can be remarkably effective in getting your message out to the public. Read on to find out how you can make and use posters and fliers as part of your organization's communications plan.

What are posters and fliers?

You probably already know what posters and fliers are: printed bills meant to be posted in a public place or private workplace. Posters tend to be fairly large and professionally printed, and almost always feature an illustration, while fliers (also known as miniposters) are usually 8 ½" x 11" or so, are often simply photocopied, and often rely solely on words to get their point across. Posters and fliers are usually informational in nature. They can also be used to affirm positive behaviors or draw people to an event. 

What are the advantages of posters and fliers?

Posters and flyers can be displayed almost anywhere. However, places where you have a "captive audience" are the best: 

• school classrooms (particularly when you're targeting younger children)      
• examination and waiting rooms at dental and medical clinics      
• buses or other public transit      
• community service organization offices      
• anyplace where people will be standing in line 

A good poster can have staying power for years. You probably won't want to use the exact same content for years at a time, but using a coherent theme, the same artist, or other elements to make your group's posters recognizable is a good idea. For example, posters of Uncle Sam pointing his finger and saying "I want you!" have been used as a recruitment tool for the military since World War I. 

Fliers can easily be mailed to almost anyone. It's simple to fold, staple, and slap a stamp and an address label on an eye-catching flyer about an upcoming event. 

Fliers are cheap. You can create 1000 flyers for $50 or so relatively quickly; compared to print advertisements and to many other media, that's pretty good. 

Fliers can often be photocopied onto transparencies for use as overheads. This is useful if you're using fliers to supplement a more formal education or public awareness campaign that involves presentations.

How to create your poster or flier

Decide on your communication objective. 

While you may want to jump ahead and start working on a cool image or a catchy slogan, we can't emphasize enough how important it is to clearly identify your communication objective from the start. If you ignore this step, your entire campaign could be rendered ineffective. Take the time to define a communication objective first and foremost. 

1. Ask "What event or benefit are we promoting?" or "What attitudes or behaviors do we want to change or promote?" This is the essence of your message (e.g., "Smoking can cause cancer," or "Breastfeeding is good for your baby").      
2. Examine what benefits the communication objective holds for your target audience. For example, for "Breastfeeding is good for your baby," some benefits would include: breastfed babies are less likely to develop respiratory infections, childhood diabetes, and childhood lymphoma; they have fewer learning disabilities; they're 1/3 less likely to die of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome; and they have fewer ear and diarrheal infections.      
3. Use these answers to come up with benefit statements -- the reasons why your audience should want to do whatever it is you're trying to get them to do. Make sure that your benefit statements are accurate too -- otherwise, you risk undercutting your message with false or misleading information. 

Decide on your target audience. 

This is essential. You will probably need to do some pretesting with that audience as well. This will help you decide how the entire message will be conveyed. Make sure your benefit statements are understandable to that audience. If a statement like "Breastfed babies are less likely to develop respiratory infections, childhood diabetes, and childhood lymphoma" is too complicated for your audience, try something like "Breastfed babies are less likely to get sick" instead. 

Develop your concept. 

1. Sketch out some ideas. Don't get caught up in making it look perfect at this point -- that comes much later. Just use lots of paper and let your imagination run wild.      
2. Look at what you have and play with other words. Puns, double meanings, and other types of word play often work very well in poster campaigns. Try to think of ways that the visual elements of the poster or flyer could play on the words as well.      
3. Let your mind make associations freely with the words, without criticizing yourself and without worrying about neatness. Get others involved with the brainstorming process. Keep in mind that whatever you come up with needs to be something that can fit well in the amount of space you have for your poster or flyer. For example, for a detailed explanation of the health benefits of breastfeeding, you might want to make up brochures instead.      
4. At this point it's a good time to toss ideas around with friends. If you know anyone who's a graphics pro, here's where that person can step up to the plate. Also, check out what other groups have done.      
5. Leave it for a day or two and come back to it later. Once you have it in the back of your mind, you could find the perfect idea comes to you at an unexpected time. 

Consider what visual you might want to use (if any). 

It's not absolutely essential that your poster or flier even have graphics. Generally, it's more important for a poster to have a graphic than for a flier, simply because it grabs your audience's attention. 

If you do decide to use a graphic, your choice of image is very important. According to Adbusters (http://www.adbusters.org), a magazine run by a media activist organization called The Media Foundation, 70% of people only look at the graphic when viewing a print ad or poster, while 30% only read the headline. Therefore, the image you use is going to be the most important part of the process in making a poster. 

Types of graphics:  Clip art is "canned" artwork designed for use in publications or web pages; using it is usually free or very inexpensive, although you may be required to credit the creator somewhere on your poster. Using clip art can save time for artists and makes art both possible and affordable for non-artists. Clip art can be purchased in cd-rom or book form, it is often packaged with computer software (Microsoft Word, for example, comes with a sizable collection of clip art images), and it can be found at a variety of web sites (see Resources at the end of this section for a list of web sites offering free clip art).   Photos can be extremely effective, but they can be cost-prohibitive. Don't use photos unless your group can afford to pay for a good photographer and quality printing to make it look right.

Original artwork can also be very effective, but like photography, it can get expensive. Ask around -- it's possible that someone within your organization has artistic talent and would love to design your poster. You might think also about holding a community-wide contest, if your area offers a large enough pool of talented artists to do so. 

Write your headline and, if using any, text. 

1. The headline should be short, snappy, connected somehow to the reader's life, and should affect the reader emotionally. 

2. Make your case for the communication objective in the copy. Make compelling arguments and state strong facts. It's better to have one or two very strong statements than to try to rattle off a long list and risk diluting the message. 

3. Decide on what type of lettering to use. Here are a handful of tips: 

• Remember, if this is a poster, it will need to be easily readable from a distance -- so big, clear lettering is the best.      
• Whenever possible, use a serif typeface for the body text -- most typography experts feel they're easier to read for most folks. A serif typeface is one in which a stroke added to the beginning or end of one of the main strokes of a letter, such as Times New Roman, Bookman Old Style, or Courier New. A sans serif typeface is simply one without serifs, generally with a straightforward, geometric appearance, such as Helvetica, Arial, or Impact. Sans serif fonts are very effective in headlines.      
• Although these days of computers and word processing might make it tempting, don 't go too crazy with the fonts -- use no more than 3 or 4 fonts at the most, and the fewer the better.     
• If you have a lot of copy, break it up with smaller subheadings within. This keeps it from all blending together in the viewer's eye and makes it easier to read. 

Lay out your final poster or flier. 

There are many different ways you can lay out your poster or flier. Again, this is a good time to check out posters and fliers done by other groups and to get suggestions and feedback from others. 

Include your group's name, logo, address, and phone number. Your group's name and logo should be prominent enough for people to remember that it was your group that put this poster or flier out. The address and phone number can be printed very small, but it should appear somewhere on the final piece. 

If you're just doing an informational flier to send out to a mailing list, it can be done very simply and plainly, as in the example below. 

Later in this section, you'll find some more tips on poster design and mistakes to avoid. 

Circulate drafts and get feedback from others. 

Be sure to have several other people -- including people from outside your group -- look over your finished photocopy or flyer. Get their honest opinions and use their feedback to help you decide on the final version. 

Have it printed or photocopied. 

It's possible to avoid, or at least reduce, the expense of paying a professional printer. Find out if anyone in your group works for a printing company or knows anyone who does. Approach area printers to see if any of them would donate or offer reduced fees for their services.