Krishna Solanki - Web Designer, creative bod, & pizza lover!

How to Create an A5 Promotional Flyer

In this tutorial I plan to take you through how to create an A5 promotional single sided Flyer. Right from initial layout sketches through to Photoshop designs and then finally completing the Flyer in InDesign.

The tutorial will be based on something I recently created and completed for a charity sports tournament.  The final flyer will look like the below:

The concept of creating this flyer came through a very rough requirements brief, which I summarised and then began to think of design concepts.

The first thing I did was to roughly sketch and label how I envisaged the final flyer to look.  Sometimes it’s easier to grab a pen and paper and draw it out, so that’s what I did.  I roughly knew what elements I wanted to incorporate, and I had also had an idea of what font and colours I wanted to use, so I jotted these down with my initial sketch.

Once I knew what I wanted to achieve, I started with the actual design. This is where the real work begins!

Creating the Photoshop document

I am very comfortable with Photoshop, so I decided to create the graphical elements, the design, in Photoshop.

It’s important to remember designing for Print is very different to designing for the web.  Therefore, it’s essential to get the document set up correct.

Here is the set up I used:

• A5 size: width = 15.8cm, height = 22cm
• Resolution: 300 pixels/inch
• Colour: CMYK mode

Ok, so document is created.  Lets not forget to create the Bleed.  The bleed is the area outside of the print area, so if any element on your document layout makes contact with the document border you will have to use bleed.  The trick is to place the element so that it goes over border where the document will be cropped after printing.

Photoshop does not have any bleed settings available when creating a new document so it is a good idea to create the bleed settings yourself.  General European bleed sizes are measured in Millimetres (mm) and are usually between 3-5mm.

For the purpose of this flyer I created 5mm bleed on each side. (double click on the rulers to change the unit to “mm” if it isn’t already.

Below are the bleed guides I used:

• Horizontal: 5mm
• Vertical: 5mm
• Horizontal: 215mm
• Vertical: 153mm

Creating the Photoshop design

Right so the document is set up correctly, now its time to get creative and actually design the flyer. I based mine on the rough sketch I had initial drawn up, plus added a few elements to make it look great.  I found some really cool sports vectors (here) which I added as well.

Once you have finalised the design save it as a JPG, obviously save the PSD file as well.

Creating the InDesign document

Ok, so the Photoshop design has been finalised and you have created the JPG.  Now for the InDesign aspect.  Open InDesign and create a new document at A5 size.

Using the “File -> Place image” element, import the JPG you created.

Arrange the JPG to fit within the boundaries of the A5 InDesign document, and save the document as an InDesign file.

Export the document as a PDF and ensure the PDF contains crop marks and bleeds.

That’s pretty much it. The flyer is done….

Just for extra precautions, and best measure, I tested the PDF out to make sure my design looked just as good once printed out.  For this I printed the PDF out on an A4 sized paper and cut along the crop marks.

Once I was happy, I sent the PDF to the client and then finally this was sent to the printers and the flyer was officially completed!

Comments

1. Dan

   September 12th, 2011 @ 06:23

   Really nice tutorial, i don’t have this skills so I prefere to go on http://www.minuteflyer.com there is allready made templates, and save me time.