Every Amtgard group will at some point need to promote itself, in order to get more people to join, to advertise an event that they are hosting, or just when someone walks by your park and notices that people are dressed funny and want to either join up, or tell it to someone they know who would like this sort of thing, and they ask for contact information. Getting word out about your park can be very important in getting new members. I would suggest trying to find interest in high schools, colleges, comic book shops, gaming shops, and coffeehouses.

If you would like some custom made flyers or other promotional material completed for your group, contact me and I'll be happy to help you come up with something.

That is the reason for this web site. This is a collection of flyers and business cards I've created over the years for various groups, so you can see how to create something like this. You don't even have to have a complicated graphics program if you don't want to, just a word processing program that can handle pictures.

Most of the flyers here are done in black and white because you can recreate black and white very cheaply. I would use color on flyers if a. you have the money to make color copies, and b. you want to make your flyer stand out amongst a crowd of other flyers, like on a college posting board. There are several things you want to keep in mind when you create flyers:

| Rules of Thumb for Creating Flyers | Flyers for Attracting New People | Pamphlet | Flyers for Events | Business Cards

Rules of Thumb for Creating Flyers
1. Know your audience. Who are you creating this for? High School aged kids? Parents? Other Amtgarders? Keep the text and images age and group appropriate. Try to make Amtgard not look like a bunch of punks who roam parks hitting each other, unless those people are your audience, people you want to attract with this flyer. I wouldn't suggest making a flyer with someone flipping the bird and post it around town.
2. Keep text to a minimum. Sure, it would be nice to know the shot diagram, but don't crowd out secondary information to stuff that is important, like when and where you play.
3. Make important text stand out. Enlarge or colorize important information, the eye is drawn to it first.
4. Make the flyer stand out amongst other flyers. This can be done is several ways, from having an interesting balance between positive and negative space, to images that will catch the eye of people.
5. Make it easily reproducible. Black and white is the easiest to reproduce, try to keep gradients to a minimum. I break this rule a lot.
6. Photographs should have people in garb. Even if you don't wear garb that often, you are supposed to.
7. KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Don't fill up every inch of the flyer with information, images and whatever. Put the basics down and have it look pretty. That's all you really need.
Flyers for Attracting New People (Click to Enlarge)
Flyers are used as a mass attraction point. They are easy to make, and you can post them, or have a stack of them at a demo, or hand them out.
Pamphlet (Click to Enlarge)
This is a three fold pamphlet that I did not make, but Kindyr created it with artwork from Shijin from Phoenix Tears. These are good if you have people interested, and they want more information.
Event Flyers (Click to Enlarge)
Event flyers differ from flyers designed to attract new people, the audience is already in amtgard, so you can cut out the whole lets be family oriented and shiny and happy. Unless that's the people you want to go to your event. Some of these are designed as internet ads.
Business Cards (Click to Enlarge)
Carrying these around, in your wallet, your glove box or your purse, can always be useful. You can buy cheap punch out card packs at your local office supply store and print them out yourself.