Flyer Design

Let's talk about Flyer design. Flyers are fun and exciting. They are a sub-genre in a culture of its own. Flyers are an industry staple to the Party (and club) scenes worldwide. So, as a designer you'll probably either love them or hate them. But they do offer many exciting areas to explore which will make you a more well-rounded designer. By studying and producing flyers you can become a much more versatile graphic designer and Photoshop user yourself.

Learn from Photoshop Design and you can build your own reputation and if you have a network with promoters or dj's it should be fairly easy to establish yourself (as long as you are good). As a Photoshop Designer you want to be building your portfolio. This is what you can show to other people, potential clients and to yourself.

Flyer design can be very exciting and when you consider that they are printed and distributed to 100's or 1000's of people per print, just think about how many people are seeing your design and are being influenced by it to attend an event. I recommend getting The First Edition so you can get into understanding the elements involved so you can start producing them on your own.

Flyers come in many different sizes. If you are working with a client make sure that you know what they have in mind and you can work with them on it. You will send them some comps and wait to get some feedback. If you're working independently, make sure you have a good idea of what they want but limit your time by only including 2 or 3 revisions at the most.

You will most likely want to work in CMYK because it is the industry standard print/press format. Also use 300 dpi or higher to ensure that you have clear enough resolution. Make sure you check with whoever you're printing through to follow their production standards.

Flyers will often use great photography. Although a lot of the time club photography is used, sometimes you will see (and can use) very off the wall visuals. You could use close-ups of some interesting lines, architecture, traffic. Trance flyers will often have a scene of nature, just a simple photograph. But the key thing here is...

Most flyers are text and vector based. It is the balance of vectors & text (often with bitmap) that produces a great flyer. Many flyers must squeeze as much info as they possibly can into the space available so that promoters can get the most advertisement in. You will often see the super tiny text in many designs. In flyers, this usually serves a practical purpose, so get used to using really small font sizes.

If you want to become a great flyer designer you should get a hold of the First Edition because I go through many great tutorials but also just start collecting flyers (in the U.S. this works really well in larger cities) and study them. You will see many of the elements that are being talked about come to life. You will also start to appreciate the balance between text, vector and bitmap (ie.foto).

Sometimes all it takes is a good font and symbol library as well as some quality photos to choose from. Design is both deliberate and accidental. As a designer you have an idea of what you want to produce and you will understand the elements involved and start using them together and sometimes you will be surprised as things turned out better than you expected. However this isn't always the case and this is where practice comes in but the more you understand the fundamental elements (of flyers in this case) the more you can start synergizing them together for a great design.

You will use text and vectors (ie. shapes, symbols) a lot. One of the most popular techniques is using the Text Stroke (usually red or blue) of 1-3pt. Get used to using the text stroke (under the layer effects menu) and get to know your fonts. I also show you how to distort vectors to make them look 3-D. The iPSD Flyer Designer Collection(http://www.photoshopdesigner.com) is perfect for truly understanding flyer design because you have the entire finished and interactive product in front of you in Photoshop so you can see all of the elements and how they work together! iPSD Flyer .psd's even come with annotations to further clue you in to how the flyer was made in Photoshop.

Often flyers will have random circles, lines, screened shape layers (lowered opacity to use as an underlay for text), independent layer selections (ie. people), pixel stretch, zoom filter & basic color fills. I go through them in detail in the First Edition and will be teaching some of these techniques throughout the PSDer Ezine. You're guaranteed to learn a lot with the iPSD Flyer .psd files; it will just fast-forward your working knowledge of Photoshop for graphic design.

Making flyers in Photoshop can be a very rewarding and lucrative