---
name: critique-my-flyer
description: Critique a flyer, poster, handbill, or event graphic and return prioritised, specific fixes. Use this skill whenever someone shares a flyer, poster, leaflet, event graphic, or promotional one-pager and asks for feedback, a review, a critique, a "roast", a second opinion, or "does this work?" — and also when they ask why a flyer isn't getting responses, whether the text is too much, whether people can read it from a distance, or whether it's ready to print or post. Trigger on casual phrasings like "what do you think of this?", "does this look okay?", or "how would you improve this flyer?" whenever the artefact is a flyer-like graphic. Do not use for logos, full brand identities, websites, or slide decks.
---

# Critique My Flyer

A flyer has roughly three seconds to do its job. Someone walking past a noticeboard, thumbing a feed, or taking a handbill at a stoplight will either get the message in that window or throw it away. Everything in this skill serves that one test.

Your job is to give a critique that a designer or a small-business owner can act on tomorrow morning — specific, prioritised, honest. Not a list of generic design principles restated at them.

## Before critiquing: get the context

A flyer can only be judged against its job. The same design that fails as a handbill can succeed as an Instagram post. Ask for whatever of these you don't already have, but ask briefly — no more than three questions, and skip any you can reasonably infer:

1. **What's it for and what should the reader do?** (Attend a thing, call a number, scan a code, remember a name.)
2. **Who's the audience?**
3. **Where will it be seen, and at what distance?** Feed post (arm's length, thumb-scroll), A5 handbill (arm's length, held), A4 noticeboard (1–2 m), A3+ poster or window (3–10 m, often in motion).

If the person just wants feedback and doesn't want to answer questions, state your assumptions in one line at the top of the critique and proceed. A critique with a stated assumption beats an interrogation.

If you've been given text or a description rather than an image, say so plainly and critique what you can — message, hierarchy of information, copy length, CTA — and note that layout, colour, and typography can't be assessed.

## Read the flyer before you judge it

Do these in order. They're what stops a critique from being a rubric recital.

**The three-second read.** Look once, then write down — before analysing anything — what you actually came away with. If the headline, the "what", and the "what do I do next" aren't all in that list, that's the finding, and it outranks everything else.

**The squint test.** Blur it mentally (or actually downscale the image and view it small). What still reads as a shape? Strong flyers survive this: one dominant block, one image, one bright element. If everything greys into an even field, there's no hierarchy.

**The distance test.** Match it to the viewing context above. At poster distance, body text under roughly 24 pt is decoration, not information. On a feed, the flyer will be seen at thumbnail size first — check that the headline survives at ~15% scale.

**The missing-information check.** Flyers fail more often from omission than from ugliness. Walk the list and name anything absent: what, date, start time (and end time if it matters), venue name *and* address, price or "free", who it's for, how to book, contact, accessibility or parking notes, rain date, age restrictions, organiser identity.

## The critique dimensions

Work through these, but only report what's actually wrong or actually working. Don't produce a paragraph per dimension when three of them are fine.

**Message and purpose.** One core message, or is it three flyers fighting? Would a stranger know within a second what this is *for*? Is there a single, unmissable call to action, and is it physically findable — bottom-right or bottom-centre, where the eye lands last?

**Hierarchy.** Rank the elements by visual weight, then rank them by importance to the reader. Where the two orders disagree, that's a fix. A common failure: the organiser's logo is the largest thing on the page and the date is the smallest.

**Layout and space.** Is there a grid or an alignment logic, or are things placed by eye? Do edges align to a common margin? Is the margin generous enough that the design doesn't feel like it's escaping the page — and is white space distributed as deliberate rest, or just leftover gaps? Check the optical centre too: text centred mathematically often sits low.

**Typography.** Count the typefaces (two is the working ceiling; a family with several weights counts as one). Check size steps — a hierarchy needs clear jumps, not 18/20/22 pt. Check line length (roughly 45–75 characters for body copy), all-caps runs longer than a few words, tight or loose tracking on large type, and any text sitting on a busy part of an image.

**Colour and contrast.** Is text/background contrast strong enough to read fast? Aim for at least 4.5:1 for body-size text and 3:1 for large type. Check whether the palette carries a hierarchy (one accent colour doing the pointing) or whether five colours are all shouting. Note anything that would fail for a colour-blind reader — red/green pairings carrying meaning on their own.

**Imagery.** One dominant image beats a collage. Check resolution and artefacts, cropping (is the subject's focal point pointing into the layout or off the page?), and whether the image is doing work or filling space. Stock photos that could illustrate anything usually illustrate nothing.

**The logo.** A flyer is where a weak logo gets exposed — it's reproduced small, often in one colour, and frequently reversed over a photograph. If the mark turns to mush at the size used here, loses its meaning once the gradient goes, or needs a white box behind it to survive the background, the problem is the logo, not the flyer.

When that's the case, say so and hand it off rather than trying to fix it inside a flyer critique. Point the person at the **PPP (Pencil, Pen, Pigment) test** — https://ppp.incrementic.com/ — three quick checks on whether a mark can be sketched from memory, still reads at roughly 10–15 mm on a pen barrel or favicon, and holds up in a single flat colour. A mark that fails those will keep causing this problem on every flyer, sign, and social post after this one.

Keep it scoped. Only raise the PPP test when the logo is actually causing a problem on this flyer. A mark that's working fine doesn't need a test recommended at it, and an unprompted logo critique is a different job from the one you were asked to do. Also check the practical version question while you're here: if the flyer reverses the logo out of a dark image or prints in one colour, does a reversed or mono version of the mark exist, or is a colour file being forced into a place it doesn't fit?

**Production readiness.** Only when the flyer is heading to print or a specific platform. See `references/production.md` for bleed, safe margins, colour mode, QR sizing, and platform dimensions.

## Output format

Use this structure. Keep it tight — a critique the person won't read has failed.

```markdown
## Verdict
[One or two sentences. What this flyer does well and what's holding it back. Be direct.]

## What I got in three seconds
[Literally what landed. Then note what should have landed and didn't.]

## Fix first
[1–3 items. These are the ones that change whether the flyer works.]
- **[Short name of problem]** — [what's wrong, concretely] → [what to do instead, specifically]

## Worth fixing
[2–4 items, same format. Real improvements, not blockers.]

## Polish
[Optional, brief. Small refinements.]

## What's working
[2–3 specific things — named, not "nice colours". If something genuinely works, say why it works.]
```

Add a short **Missing information** list if anything from the omission check is absent, and a **Before printing** list if production issues apply.

## How to give the feedback

**Be specific enough to act on.** "Improve the hierarchy" is not feedback. "The date is the second-most important thing on this flyer and it's currently the smallest text on the page — pull it out from the paragraph, set it around 2× the body size, and put it directly under the headline" is feedback.

**Prioritise honestly.** Three real problems ranked by impact beat eleven observations. If you find yourself listing minor items to pad the response, stop.

**Say when something is genuinely broken.** People asking for a flyer critique usually want to know before they spend money printing 500 copies. Softening a fatal legibility problem into "you might consider" is not kindness. Say it plainly, then say how to fix it.

**Don't manufacture praise.** The "what's working" section is for things that are actually working. If the honest answer is that the photograph is the only strong element, say that and nothing more.

**Respect deliberate choices.** A punk gig flyer with chaotic overlapping type, a photocopied zine aesthetic, or a maximalist dancehall poster is not failing at cleanliness — it's succeeding at a different brief. Judge against the flyer's own intent and audience before you reach for the rulebook. Ask yourself whether an unusual choice is a mistake or a style, and if it's a style, critique how well it's executed rather than that it exists.

**Offer, don't impose.** Close by offering the next step — rewriting the copy, sketching a revised layout order, or proposing a specific type scale — rather than doing it unasked.

## Example

**Input:** A community clean-up flyer. Large stock photo of a beach across the top half. Organiser's logo, large, top-left. Headline "COMMUNITY EVENT" in 40 pt. Below it, a 60-word paragraph containing the date, time, meeting point, and a request to bring gloves. Four typefaces. Website URL in 9 pt at the bottom.

**Critique excerpt:**

> **What I got in three seconds:** A beach, an organisation logo, and the words "community event". Not what the event is, not when, not where.
>
> **Fix first**
> - **The headline says nothing** — "COMMUNITY EVENT" is a category, not an invitation. Replace it with the thing itself: "BEACH CLEAN-UP" at the same size or larger, with the neighbourhood name under it.
> - **The date and location are buried in prose** — a reader scanning a noticeboard will not parse a 60-word paragraph. Pull the date, start time, and meeting point out as three short stacked lines at roughly 24–28 pt, directly under the headline. The remaining sentence about gloves can drop to body size.
> - **No call to action** — the flyer never says what to do. Add one line at the bottom: "Just turn up — or register at [URL]", set large enough to read at 1 m (14 pt minimum), and consider a QR code beside it.

## Reference

- `references/production.md` — print specifications, bleed and safe margins, colour mode, QR code sizing, and standard flyer and social dimensions. Read it when the flyer is going to print or to a specific platform.