End of Year Show - publication advertisement

After we had designed the overall style for our end of year show branding, we delegated each left over task to each of us. I was in charge of developing the publication advertisement, Emma the email banner, Shuffs the social media and Hannah the A6 flyer.

AS there were no dimensions specified for the publication advert, I decided to work from mock ups and provide one horizontal advert and one vertical advert, for variation.

Version 1:

After creating these publication adverts, I realised that the photos I had used were not the photos we had chosen to go in the final set for the print posters. I felt that the photos should be consistent across all of the promotional materials we were using, and as the layout of the text on the advert depended on the content and composition of the photograph, I would have to create a new advert that would stay in keeping with the rest of the promotional materials.

Version 2 

Instead of the photo in the previous experiments, I instead decided to use one of the photos we had chosen and edited for the purposes of the promotional materials. Text placement with this photo was also difficult as the banner was horizontal and the photo was not taken in landscape. The dimensions of the ad were also long and thin, which made the placement even trickier. I began with having the photo in the middle of the ad, copying the style of the rest of the posters we had already created. However I found with this positioning, I had to break up the text, which didn't suit the existing style, and made the ad look very unbalanced. As well as this, the title was almost illegible. To counteract this, I instead decided to place the photo to the left of the ad, cropping it and filling the surrounding space with content aware - to give the photo different dimensions to the original. Doing this gave me a lot of empty space where the text information could be placed with no compromise on legibility. I chose to place the title just above the information as opposed to further up the ad, per the existing style. This left a bit of space above all the text which I think the ad needed to avoid overcrowding.

Version 3

For the vertical advertisement, I didn't have to alter the photo as much as the previous advertisement. For this, I could use one of the existing photos in the portrait layout we had taken them in. For this ad, I first placed the text above the photo as this was where the most space was. However, this design looked unbalanced, so instead, I moved the title down the page to reflect the style of the posters we had made. I decided that I didn't like this positioning as there was too much space left above the model and the title looked out of place. I decided to change the positioning and instead cropped the photo so that the extra space would be under the model instead. Placing all of the text below the model balanced the design, providing a form of hierarchy within the elements on the page.

Mock up

For the publication advertisements, I worked to the best mock up I could find, as we needed to present the ad in a real life context. The mock up itself is good as it provides 2 different formats so I could provide 2 options for designs. However it looked a bit unprofessional in its original format. To counteract this, I changed the text inside the mock up to reflect the subject matter, instead of lorem ipsum, or filler text. As well as this, I made the background slightly darker, to a grey instead of an off white, which contrasted with the newspaper more. Finally, for presentation purposes, I cropped the mock up so that only the ads would show within the paper. This cut out any extra unneeded content and made the mock up look a lot cleaner to present.