Attention-grabbing flyer designs can change the fortunes of events or products, by making people notice them and building excitement. With more and more media competing for viewers’ attention than ever before, it’s a real challenge to keep people interested these days.
Artwork and printing are important factors to consider, and the overall design – including careful use of colour and font pairings – also needs careful attention for it to achieve its purpose. The art of flyer design is a great place to get inspiration. Here are the best examples of flyer design that we’ve found, to help inspire your next project.
01. BE Flyer
Patterns draw the eye, and this complicated black and mustard design created by Joris Rigerl certainly makes you want to look again. The clever use of pattern in the word “Be” makes the writing just about clear enough to see, but it’s necessary to look closer to understand what’s written there – like a magic eye picture. This striking example uses the full force of a pattern to attract attention but you could just play with accents instead.
02. The Wing Sydney opening
Carmen Zeng drew inspiration from origami in this flyer design for The Wing. The Wing is a US network of community and work spaces specifically for women, and the flyer needed to promote its expansion to Sydney. The flyer design aims to capture the network’s ethos of collaboration and inclusivity.
“The twist fold is a physical metaphor depicting The Wing’s growth, and adds visual flair and movement to the design,” explains Zeng on Behance. The combination of pink paper and blue ink echoes The Wing’s branding, and strong typography contrasts with more delicate linework illustrations.
“The use of ripples as stylistic embellishments generate a mysterious mood, captivating audience’s attention to encourage them to seek out the opening event for The Wing Sydney,” adds Zeng. The flyer has been printed using a risograph machine, to give an additional level of texture.
03. Prémio Douro Criativo
Prémio Douro Criativo is an award celebrating creativity in the Portuguese region of Duoro. With an entire branding scheme centred around the idea of folded paper, it made sense that the flyer for the event wasn’t just a flat sheet. Double-sided printing and clever folding to juxtapose different colours and patterns help this design stand out. The identity for the awards was created by Portuguese studio Lateral in collaboration with designer Nick Öhlo.
04. Fiera di Santa Lucia
These eye-grabbing flyers were designed to promote the Fiera di Santa Lucia back in 2016. The street fair includes music, shows, market stalls, artists and artisans, and takes place in Savignano sul Rubicone in Italy. Italian graphic designer Matteo Vandelli worked with Guilia Faini and Luca Sarti to create a bold, distinctive and brightly coloured identity that would capture a festive mood. The trio came up with six different patterns that could be mixed-and-matched across posters, programmes, and of course these flyers.
05. Zach Darlington
This Liverpool-based designer has taken things back to basics with his self-promo flyer. We love all the amazing things you can do with Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC and InDesign CC, but sometimes you can’t beat the old-school combination of a photocopier, scissors, glue and sheer bloody-mindedness. Good work, Zach Darlington, on this retro collage-style flyer.
06. Konsens #1 Vernissage
Created by Philipp Möckli in collaboration with Max Frischknecht, these A7 flyers for Konsens magazine really stand out thanks to Risograph printing, which uses a layering technique similar to that used in silk screen printing to produce multi-coloured prints.
07. Keramikdesign Fachklasse
These flyers, created by Studio Bureau for the ceramics department at the Bern School of Design, Switzerland, are the gift that keeps on giving. Publicising a graduation exhibition themed around the German word ‘Verzogen’, meaning twisted, the eye-catching flyer was designed to be turned and twisted into the exhibition poster.
08. Kunsthalle Bozen
Studio Mut designed the identity and communication for Kunsthalle Bozen, an art space in Bolzano, Italy, that wants to become a centre for hedonism and beauty. The Italian graphic design studio’s identity design conveys this youthful spirit with anti-establishment, Just-Do-It-In-PowerPoint aesthetics and the use of stretched black and white type, as you can see from these in-your-face flyers.
09. Panama Plus
These flyers are for Panama Plus, which is a subculture festival of art, music, creative performance and writing. Munich-based design bureau Moby Digg, working in collaboration with ZOO, took the vibrancy of the festival as inspiration to create this vivid, colourful artwork. Each piece of material for the show features a circle filled with a different brightly coloured gradient, which is then fed through a glitch generator. The result is a beautiful, eye-catching series of visuals.
10. Kari Feinstein’s Style Lounge
Freelance graphic designer and illustrator Eugenia Anselmo used this creative type treatment to produce a digital flyer for Kari Feinstein PR. She actually made a selection of options for this brief, each of which is an interesting experiment with the same look and feel. Above you can see the final version of the right – take a look at the full gallery on Behance.
11. Rundgang DMI
Rundgang DMI is an exhibition in which three university departments at HAW Hamburg – Design, Media and Information – showcase their work together. The promotional material therefore had to represent each separate department in a way that tied them together to make it clear it was a single show. Villa did a superb job, giving each department its own colour and type, while maintaining a single theme across the three flyers.
12. Général Sherman
Général Sherman is a particular giant sequoia tree located in a national park in California, and also the name of a bar in Montreal, Canada. Design agency BZOING used the foliage of the tree and some beautiful type for its flyer. It fits nicely with the general branding for the bar, which incorporates photography of leaves, twigs, fruit and herbs.
13. Joanna Kosinska
Joanna Kosinska is a freelance graphic designer based in West Yorkshire who loves creating logos, websites and brochures. To drum up business she created this beautiful A3 Z fold flyer printed on 350gsm recycled paper. The illustrated cover folds out to reveal a little about herself and her skills, and on the other side is a capsule portfolio featuring a few selected samples of her work.
14. Manage Your Day-to-Day
To promote Manage Your Day-to-Day, a 99U book suggesting the way that we work needs to change, Matias Corea, Raewyn Brandon and Jocelyn K. Glei created this fold-out flyer/poster. “The idea was to create a print piece that would give people a succinct overview of the book, while also giving them something with lasting value,” says Brandon.
“Thus, the piece folds out to create an active experience of learning about the book; then, when it’s fully unfolded, the piece works as a motivational quote poster that you can tack up over your desk.”
15. Drop Inn Hostel
This is a simple but brilliant concept for the Drop Inn hostel, based in Singapore. Created by local creative agency Bravo, this luxury and stylishly designed O-shaped flyer informs each recipient that the hostel has dropped its vital vowel and will therefore reward guests who return them with a discount on room rates.
16. CSUS Spring Show
To promote its student show back in Spring 2011, California State University, Sacramento commissioned designer Christine Jackson to create these promotional flyers.
The threading of various icons in the design cleverly demonstrates both the artistic side and connectivity of the graphic and interior design and photography departments.
17. Kukuvaja
This flyer for Kukuvaja was designed by Germany-based artist Alexandra Turban. We love the playful execution, cool colour combinations and distinctive illustration style on show.
18. Organic
Organic is by Tess Redburn. Redburn is a UK-based illustrator with a knack for eye-catching flyer designs. Her colourful, abstract and sometimes surreal illustrations have featured on promo material for festivals, businesses, exhibitions and gigs. Redburn’s work straddles the boundary between fine art and illustration, and draws inspiration from Modernism, Art Deco and 20th century artists such as Fernand Léger.
19. Muah!
This custom typography, silkscreen flyer design was printed on limited run in special colour edition in A5 size. We love the experimental layout and the careful selection of colours. It’s the work of Czech Republic-based studio Anymade.
Next page: More brilliant examples of flyer design