Billboards are an entirely different animal in the advertising world. You have just a brief moment to get your message across to the viewer. There isn’t a 30 second window, or even a 10 second one. Sometimes it’s 5 seconds or less, depending on traffic, and the speed the car/bus/train is traveling. Here are some effective billboards that I shot while driving through Brooklyn one day. These are great billboard designs.
An amazingly executed job by Coca Cola. All three soccer players are smiling and staring towards the bottle. The corporate logo is clear and identifiable at the upper left, with a simple, two-word catch phrase “open happiness”. Why are the guys so happy? Oh, it’s the cola. It’s plain and clear. You see it, and you get it. And yeah, it only takes a few seconds. Brand recognition is visible not only in the form of the logo, but also in the product itself. The photography is excellent, and the image has been stylized in almost an illustrative way to make it stand out from the crowd.
The Applie iPad did it right also. Logo, upper left hand corner. It’s human nature that we read from the top left hand side, from left to right. It’s proven fact. They placed the logo and product logotype there. The photo of the woman lounging with the iPad on her lap, shows how portable the product is. It’s almost like you’re looking over her shoulder. This billboard has no words other than the product name, but it promotes the lifestyle. Once again, less is more. And when is the last time you saw a crop like this on a billboard? This woman is relaxed, and enjoying her brand new iPad. Similar to the Coca Cola ad above, the product here speaks for itself. There is no need to busy the ad up with website urls, phone numbers, or any other call to action.
Bad billboard design has text that isn’t viewable from further than a few car lengths away, and they usually have way too much text. You can’t read that much text on a billboard, because you’re usually traveling at least 65 mph down the highway as you’re viewing it. Mostly passengers will have the advantage over the drivers, but effective ads will be brief enough to be noticeable to the drivers as well. If you ever have the privilege to design a billboard, keep these pointers in mind.
A logo is a huge part of branding and corporate identity. The goal of a logo is to be memorable enough that it differentiates one business from every other one. It could just be logotype, with a slight clever twist on, or off of, one of the characters in the brand’s name. Or, a good logo design might integrate a hidden message within. A top logo design makes nice use of negative space, and also has the ability to be used in part or in full as design elements within other pieces of the company’s branding and marketing pieces; whether those be printed colateral (business cards, letterheads, envelopes, tri-fold brochures) web design, or even interactive and video production uses. A logo design can sometimes also work in more than one color, maybe even in black and white. It could be slapped onto anything, and doesn’t get lost due to having text that is overly small, or an odd shape that doesn’t work well with certain layouts. The typography could be clean and corporate, or it can also be complex and distinctive to the brand. Would a company who manufactures dish detergent want to use a font or typeface that screams “alien space invaders”? Probably not, but then again there is always sometimes a rare exception.
Here are some of the most popular logo designs on the Behance network. To learn more about each design project and more about each artist, just click on any of the thumbnails below. Most of these even show how each designer was able to produce the logo to fit all sorts of uses for the companys’ marketing pieces. Some even show the design process, from sketch, to producing the mutliple variations, to the final result.
I have always admired the artwork of famous artist Norman Rockwell, but for some reason, never realized that he also produced illustrations and stock art for use in advertisements and marketing materials. Here are some vintage Norman Rockwell advertisements that feature his unique, photo-realistic illustrative style. Rockwell’s masterpieces even made the cover of The Saturday Evening Post a number times. Way before there was Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or even mainstream digital photography, Norman Rockwell was a true creative.
Just when you thought you’ve seen it all in creative advertising, you probably haven’t. Watch the above video clip, and let your mind be blown. Featured are entirely innovative and creative ways that companies used to advertise their products and services.
Get Noticed or Get Out
The marketing world is a pretty rough place. Mediocre in marketing just doesn’t cut it anymore. You’ve got to be memorable, and get attention. People have just about seen it all nowadays, and have been desensitized to most forms of advertising. TV commercials that don’t stand out from the rest are just plain ignored. Print ads without appealing photos or graphics are worthless. Websites without any sort of call to action are pretty much ineffective. Nowadays you have to be clever in order to really grab the attention of those potential clients or consumers.
Shopping Bag Designs That Work
How powerful is shopping bag artwork? I’d say that it’s pretty valuable, especially in urban areas or heavily trafficked shopping malls. Think about it. In larger cities most people walk or take public transportation, everywhere they go. Their purchases are going to be carried, and in turn, these consumers become walking miniature billboards for the stores they just visited. It’s free marketing for the company they purchased from, whether they like it or not. And it is cost effective, with just the small price of the printed bag production costs. Many of the shopping bags in the above video are incredible. Realizing how the bags are held, the designers laid out the imagery and product artwork according to the way the bags are used. They not only utilized the space of the bags, but also the negative space. So yeah, this means that sometimes negative space can even be off the page, or off the product packaging. There are sometimes holes, cutouts, or even drawstrings that can really be creatively combined with the overall designs.
As a stock photographer, you sometimes end up modeling in your own photos. You still have a responsibility to try and make sure that you don’t make an asinine idiot out of yourself, but unfortunately this sometimes still happens. Even worse, you could potentially make an idiot out of the people or models in your photos, depending on what you’re shooting. Thankfully this time, the dork was just me.
Following up on this previous post (a discovery of how the company Gigabyte computers used my stock image of me with my finger up my nose in an ad campaign for dockable laptop PCs) here are a few more discoveries from that ad campaign that I wanted to share.
