Free Advice: The Flier
Welcome to Free Advice Tuesdays.
Article One: The Flier
There you are, sitting in your executive chair or cubicle, and you need to put together a flier to advertise something new, or to solicit responses from your customer base. All you have at your disposal is Word or Publisher, some clip art (so dashing!) and an endless supply of super cool fonts. This is going to be fun.
You take it upon yourself to use all the spiffy fonts at your disposal. Old English, Papyrus, Comic Sans, they all find a place into your flier. Old English finds its way to the top as the header, and because it’s an important point, you type it in ALL CAPS and bold it too. And for the heck of it, you center it. Papyrus is used as the sub head, and because it’s a friendly flier, you use Comic Sans as the body text.
Yowzers.
If only I was exaggerating. For some reason, when people are confronted with a blank page and too many fonts, they go crazy and have a lot of fun. And there’s nothing wrong with having fun, but don’t subject others to it.
What happens when you use those kinds of fonts is anxiety overload. It does not look cool. It does not look antique, or weathered, or “friendly.” It’s chaos and it should not be inflicted upon the world.
So what do you do when you’re assigned a flier?
KISS it! Keep it simple, stupid.
Pick two fonts tops. A sans serif will work nicely for the headers, such as Helvetica, Arial, or another font that isn’t so common, but refreshingly simple. For the body text, chose a serif font, like Garamond, Times, Georgia, or Arno Pro (my personal favorite). If you can, add space between the lines of text (leading). If you must center the header, that’s fine, but don’t bold, underline, italicize and all caps it. Just make it a little larger, put some space between it and the body text, and leave it at that. Do not go crazy with colors. Pick something dark and easy to read. Black is awesome.
Don’t use clip art unless the life of your first born child or beloved pet is threatened (goldfish do not count). If you have to use photos, pick the best one and use that. Do not overlay text onto the photo. Do not mess with the photo’s transparency.
You may think this method of flier design is boring, but trust me, it’s not. It’s soothing and will actually work much better than using Comic Sans. Never, ever, use Comic Sans.