Designing Your Prints

You have a new printer; you agonized over the price, the type and the speed. You found the brand that got the best reviews, and you finally connected it to your desktop computer and it prints when you select print. Now you want to print a flyer for the local book club, but you aren’t sure what to do first.

The first thing you should know is the various things you can print with your new equipment. A flyer is a simple piece of paper, usually the lowest quality, with information printed on it that can be posted around town for a meeting or a lost pet. A leaflet is the same thing, printed in landscape in several sections and then folder over twice. Leaflets often contain more information than a flyer. People often use the term poster erroneously, a poster is a large flyer, and should be of higher quality.

Microsoft Office Suite has several software products that can help you design and print a simple flyer or poster. Microsoft Publisher, for example, will walk you through printing a banner-style poster using multiple sheets of paper, but you must be willing to cut away the borders. You do not need Microsoft however, open source products such as Open Office will perform many of the same functions, and often the printer you buy comes with simple software that can be used to lay out or edit images and text.

While a fancy font such as Gothic can be fun to play with, it is probably best to keep it simple with Times and use a more expensive paper to class up your print. If you want to make your flyer fun, then by all means, go for a Gothic look.

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