ad design tips

Sean Cohen Strategies for Ad design: Advertising is a brutal world. It’s usually do or die, pass or fail, huge rewards or a big waste of money. Hardly ever is there a gray area where you just break even, and make just enough sales to pay for the ad or ads. Also, since the cost of front page or full page ads is so high, we must be extra attentive to the way our ads are designed and presented in order to be effective. There are many ad designers (graphic artists) who can make or break an ad’s success in the design of the ad itself. There are several components of an ad than can be strategically addressed to almost guarantee its success or failure. Also, it’s important to understand and appreciate that there are three kinds of graphic artists employed to design ads; you want the third one! 1. True artists who have artistic talent. 2. Educated graphic designers who know how to use ad design software. 3. People who are both true artists and know how to use ad design software. It’s also very important to realize that you run a business, and that you are the best insight into how you want yourself portrayed, or your product presented, or your services illustrated and explained. The advertising you ultimately choose is at your cost, and you should have some say in how it begins, and how it ends. Even though a true artist or ad designer will probably be more creative and effective with their design of your ad, you should be creating thumbnail sketches and writing the basic copy (words and phrases) that you prefer. Then let the designer take it to the next level. Here are some strategies for designing a rough draft of your own ad: 1. Eye flow: You can lead the reader’s eyes right where you want them to go, or you can lead them off the page and on to someone else’s ad. 2. Page Center: The page center for an ad is not the real center. The first glance center is still horizontally in the middle, but vertically the center is more than likely half way between the middle and the top. Any major attention grabber in that area will also begin the eye flow, such as a picture of someone’s face or objects that serve like arrows, such as a car facing a certain direction. 3. Billboard Mentality: There are so many ads and so little time taken by readers to figure out which ones they will read, and so you have to pull in the reader in the first 3 to 5 seconds or they’re gone! That means, at first glance, your ad needs to function like a billboard, where a driver only has a few seconds to catch the idea and name. 4. Wordiness: Too much to say is usually a killer. Everyone seems to want to say everything they can to “get their money’s worth”, but if nobody reads it or calls on the ad, you never get your money’s worth anyhow. Plus, line ads get expensive, especially in the Va. Pilot, so keep it short and to the point. 5. White space: Blank space is actually artistic, and you can make your important pictures and words even more important if they’re not overwhelmed by copy all over the ad. 6. Frames: Frames are usually cheesy and make the whole ad look like it should be posted in a cheap hotel lobby or diner. Watch out for framing your ads. Let an artistic graphic designer help you choose borders for your ad that compliment your message and style. 7. Name, Contact Info and Product Recognition: Without these, you could get every person in the city to read your ad and it won’t matter a bit. Ever seen a great commercial, but you don’t even know who the advertiser was? Talk about a waste of time and money.