The five second rule is not an exaggeration
Most flyers are read for less time than it took to write that headline. Someone glances down at a table, a windscreen or a doormat, and in the space of a breath decides whether to keep reading or move on. That is the entire brief for a flyer: win the glance, or lose the job.
The instinct when a flyer is not working is to add more: another offer, another line of small print, another logo in the corner in case someone asks why it is missing. Every addition costs attention the flyer does not have to spend. The fix is almost always to take something away.
One message, not five
Before we design anything, we ask what the single thing is that this flyer needs someone to know or do. Not three things. One. Everything else on the page has to support that one message or it gets cut, moved to the website, or saved for a follow-up piece.
A flyer that tries to say everything ends up saying nothing at all.
What survives the cut
Once the single message is settled, the layout tends to sort itself out. We build every flyer around three elements, held in strict order of size:
- A headline that states the offer or the news in plain language, no cleverness required
- One supporting line that answers the obvious next question, such as when, where or how much
- A call to action that is impossible to miss, whether that is a phone number, a QR code or a date
Everything else, the extra logos, the second offer, the paragraph of background, either gets cut entirely or moved somewhere it has room to breathe. A flyer is not the place for the full story. It is the place for the first five seconds of it, done well enough that someone wants to hear the rest.
