Taking a walk around the school, it’s easy to spot flyers plastered onto bulletin boards, taped to walls and placed onto lockers. At Burnaby North, all kinds of clubs exist, and with clubs come flyers.

Barely a week goes by without new flyers showing up around the school promoting activities, fundraisers, and events in our school’s community. Flyers are the ultimate way to spread the word of something notable, or new; a perfect way to get people interested. But what makes a flyer successful? What components make them the most eye-catching to students?

Of course, the most important thing is what the flyer is promoting or announcing—the most beautiful flyer in the world could be for a pencil-eating competition. The popularity of the club will have a significant impact as well, as many already have a solid demographic willing to participate. For the sake of simplicity, we will only be looking at the flyer itself, not its contents.

A successful flyer boils down to two essential aspects: design and placement. Visual appeal is extremely important; a good design can either make or break a flyer. One thing to think about in your design is colour. Looking at the flyers currently up at school, you will notice that most of them are colour printed. This makes a flyer eye-catching, which gives it its flavour. Bright and bold colours do particularly well because they can stand out amongst the drab white walls and lockers of the school, automatically drawing people’s attention. The WYNS club’s promotional flyer is a great example of this. The flyer is bright green, with yellow stars added across the background, making it stand out further. Additionally, a great example is the leadership program’s thrift expo flyers, one of them featuring a bright yellow border with bright cartoons, and another featuring an elegant, gold-coloured background that makes it unique.

Another way is to use aesthetically pleasing and relevant colours instead of bright ones. We can see examples of this in Student Government’s pancake breakfast flyers. The colour palette is brown, red, and green—a warm brown for the pancakes, and red and green for the Christmas spirit! This palette is simple but pleasing to the eyes, intriguing passing students 

A passing-by student will only ever be willing to read so much information. Say you’re walking in the halls to get to your next class. While you rush through the halls, what are the chances you’ll stop to read a flyer with a huge block of tiny text on it? Probably very slim. Like a PowerPoint presentation, your flyer should only include the key ideas and information you want to showcase. This would probably be the name of the event, the name of the club hosting it, when it takes place and where it takes place. You want this information to be the main focus of your poster, so it should stand out by bolding, capitalizing, italicizing, enlarging, colouring, and highlighting any keywords. That way, the information can be retained more easily.

Of course, words aren’t the only way to communicate. Often, all you need is a picture to get the point across. On Home Plate Club’s clothing drive flyers, an image of three shopping bags is front and centre, indicating a fundraiser related to clothing; and on Leadership’s pizza sale flyers, a simple cartoon pizza is featured, indicating a sale related to pizza. Images easily communicate the subject of a flyer and can help draw attention to one even more than words can, which is key to creating an engaging and exciting flyer.

Finally, we move to placement. Choosing where to put a flyer can be very difficult. You want to choose the busiest spot, the place where the most people will see it, but which spots are the busiest? It seems like the most common option is walls, any part of them that’s not covered in paintings. I found the best spots to be somewhere where people frequently pass by or stop by, like on doors and near water fountains. That way, anyone using them would most definitely see or maybe even read the flyer. Another very popular option seems to be random people’s lockers, which surprised me a bit. If you were wondering if you were allowed to just plaster a flyer onto someone else’s locker without their permission, well here’s your answer! Thinking about it now, it makes sense; advertising on lockers, something which many students use frequently, engages the owners of those lockers directly. They might do this out of curiosity, or maybe just to satisfy their boredom while opening their lockers. Either way, this means more people will surely read your flyer. Owners of these lockers might even feel special, or at least amused, at how their lockers were chosen out of so many other lockers. This could lead to them telling someone about it, saying things like “Oh hey look, my locker is special now with this on it,” or “My locker is the chosen one!.” In a way, this is free advertising, all without having to put any effort at all!

Out of all the current flyers up at BNSS, one that reaches all of these standards is Christmas Cheer’s “12 Days of Cheer” poster. Although it is technically a poster, not a flyer, we can still analyze it from the same perspective for research purposes. The poster is painted all bright red, making it stand out against white walls. At the top, in a bold, clear font reads “12 Days of Cheer”, which is straight to the point and clear. Each of the twelve boxes contains a date indicating when each event takes place, a subtitle telling us what each event is about, and an image, one that’s clear and shows the point of each event. Finally, the poster is placed high up on the walls of the north foyer, a place where crowds of people constantly pass by to get to their classrooms. Almost all the things that make a flyer stand out have been included here, which is very impressive. 

There are many other factors to consider here, but overall, a successful flyer that catches people’s attention has bright or aesthetic colours, clearly placed information, helpful images, and is placed somewhere where many can see it. In general, I think the flyers here at Burnaby North are all very well-designed and thought-out. Well done to the many clubs here for working so hard to promote themselves, and thank you to you for reading this article!