Most promotional magnets go in the bin within a week

Four properties decide whether a promotional magnet earns a permanent spot on the fridge door or ends up in a drawer with the takeaway leaflets: usefulness, size, legibility and restraint. A magnet that gets even one of these wrong is competing for space it is unlikely to win.

Usefulness

The magnets that stay up do a job the fridge owner would otherwise have to do without: a school term-date calendar, a takeaway menu, a list of emergency numbers, a taxi firm's booking line. A magnet that carries only a logo and a slogan gives the household nothing to refer back to, so it holds its place for as long as the novelty lasts and then loses out to something with a reason to stay.

Size

Fridge door space is limited and shared with school notices, shopping lists and other people's magnets, so the size has to earn its footprint. A business-card-sized magnet at 85 x 55 mm competes well because it slots in alongside other things; an A5 calendar magnet has to be worth the larger space it occupies, which is why calendars, menus and reference lists tend to be printed at that size and single-message adverts are not.

Legibility

A fridge magnet is usually read from a step or two away, so the phone number or booking line has to be readable at that distance or the magnet fails at the one job it was printed to do. Design and type-size rules for phone numbers, calendar grids, QR codes and logos at 85 x 55 mm and smaller are covered in the next part of this guide.

Restraint

A magnet crowded with a logo, a strapline, three phone numbers and a QR code reads as an advert, and adverts get taken down. One with a single clear purpose, a clean calendar grid or one phone number set large enough to read from across the kitchen, reads as something worth keeping. The magnets that survive a year on someone's fridge are usually the plainest ones on it.

A calendar magnet or menu magnet earns its place on the door by working at the size it is actually printed at. Most promotional magnets are printed at 85 × 55 mm, the size of a business card, or thereabouts. A phone number set at 9pt might be perfectly legible in the artwork file at 100% zoom and unreadable once it is printed 55 mm wide and viewed from arm's length while someone is holding a saucepan.

Phone numbers and the text people actually need

The number a customer will dial should be the largest piece of text on the magnet. Set it at 14pt or larger for an 85 × 55 mm format, and use a single sans-serif weight. If the magnet carries both a landline and a mobile, decide which one the business actually wants called and print only that one larger; two equally-weighted numbers read as neither.

Calendar grids

A twelve-month calendar grid on an 85 × 55 mm magnet forces each date into a few square millimetres, which is why most printed calendar magnets that get kept use a simplified grid: month names down the side, dates in a compressed column, no day-of-week header repeated twelve times. Confirm with your printer what their house calendar template allows before drawing your own grid from scratch, since many printers supply one that is already proven to hold up at this size.

QR codes at small sizes

A QR code needs a minimum printed size to scan reliably, and that minimum depends on how much data is encoded in it. A short URL encodes into a sparser, simpler code than a full booking link with tracking parameters, so the same physical size that scans easily for one will fail for the other. As a working minimum, keep a QR code no smaller than 20 × 20 mm on a magnet of this format, and test the actual printed proof with a phone camera before the full run goes ahead, because a code that scans on a monitor at high resolution can still fail once it is printed and laminated.

Logos and the safe area

Any logo, phone number or QR code placed near the edge of a small magnet is at risk from ordinary trimming variation. The safe area, the inset zone within which no critical content should sit, matters more at 85 × 55 mm than it does on a larger format, because a 2 mm trimming shift is a rounding error on an A4 sheet but a visible clip on a business-card-sized magnet. Keep logos and text at least 3 mm inside the finished edge, and treat the corners as the least forgiving part of the layout: rounded-corner die-cutting removes more material there than a straight trim does along an edge.

Check your layout against these thresholds using the Artwork Size and Resolution Checker before sending a file to print, and see Ordering Printed Promotional Magnets: What to Specify for the full list of what to confirm with your printer alongside size and resolution.