Reference
Flyer and poster sizes
The flyer or poster size you choose changes how it is read. A pocketable A5 invites being kept; a wall-scale 24 × 36 is seen from across the room. Pick the format that matches how the piece will actually be used.
Sizes
Pick a format
Printing flyers and posters yourself
Most flyers are not printed one to a sheet. Cut from a full sheet with no margin, A4 gives 2 A5 flyers or 4 A6 handouts, and US Letter gives 2 half-letter (5.5 × 8.5 in) flyers. A home printer keeps a blank border, so the count can drop once the printable area is smaller than the sheet — the sheet layout calculator shows how many fit with your printer's margin and draws the cut lines.
A poster larger than the printer is printed in tiles and joined. With a 5 mm printer margin and a 10 mm overlap to trim and tape, an 11 × 17 poster takes 4 Letter sheets, a 24 × 36 poster 15 Letter sheets and an A1 poster 12 A4 sheets — more than the areas suggest, because every edge loses its margin and every join its overlap. The poster splitter tiles an image or PDF onto A4 or Letter and labels each sheet with its row and column.
Before printing a run, print one calibration page and measure it. A print dialog left on Fit to page shrinks every flyer by a few percent, which is invisible on one sheet and obvious when the flyers are trimmed and stacked.
Reading distance
A handout is read at arm's length, so the smallest comfortable body type is around 9–10 pt. A poster on a wall five metres away needs a headline several centimetres tall. Decide the reading distance first and size your type from there.
Bleed on flyers and posters
The same 3 mm of bleed that applies to business cards applies to flyers and posters. Posters printed by large-format services sometimes ask for 5 mm — always check the print shop's specification sheet before exporting the final file.