Print Design Ads – Half Page Ad Series
Overview
I was tasked with making a print ad to be in a tradeshow publication. I was given a bit of copy from the sales head, and allowed to come back with some designs. The ad was supposed to run for 3 months, and we could change the graphics for each run. With that being said, I wanted to make the ads look unified and part of the series. The sales head was just wanting one ad to start with, but I wanted to make sure to design all 3 ads at once, so they could be part of a visual series.
Even though the copy I received from the sales head was pretty short, I worked to condense it down to 2 sentences: the pitch, and the call the action. You’ll see the re-worked copy in the ad concepts, but here is the original so you can know the starting point given by the sales head:
The Concepts
For the concept, I may have left some of the designs rough, as I did not want to put time into getting the details right, if the concept all-together was not liked.
Messy collage:
I started this design first, but only came back to it after working the other designs fully. I was struggling with the idea of how much this ad needed to accomplish, to show “we do it all,” essentially. So I decided to lean into the overwhelming nature of the line by showing various messy lines and icons, all zipping into a desktop computer, with the pitch of the ad.
This ended up being the selected design, with the addition of some key words flowing into the computer.
1 Feature spotlight
I thought by the first ad trying to say, “we do it all,” it came across as doing nothing, as listing too many benefits at once, seemed too vague to the reader. I wanted to show what it could look like to show one great benefit, per ad, over the course of the 3 months. I did like the idea of focusing on the highlighted featured of the month, thinking someone is likely to read this, over many competing small words.
I thought this worked well as a series, the next month could focus on a different highlight, making each ad a bit unique.
People-focused
One of the competitors had their unique value proposition of being “AI First,” which to me sounded ridiculous. I thought the technology should serve and benefit PEOPLE, so this ad was my little jab at that.
Constellation
I wanted to show the very different and disparate parts of healthcare being brought into one big picture, so I decided instead of showing a product screenshot, the illustration could get the concept across, without people getting lost in the details of any particular screenshot.
Black Hole Concept
Trying to circle back to what the sales head wanted, to show ALL the things we did, I decided to list the various product features as spiraling into a black hole, representative of the “one portal.” I did change the sky to get a bit darker between each ad print, but basically the shell and wording was about the same.
Spectroscopy Concept
If you remember from chemistry, or maybe astronomy class, there was a little eye device you could look into, and it would divide the light up into it’s spectrum. Going along with this, I wanted to show ALL the things that were jammed into the portal. I suspect that this would be a less favoured design, as the company tends to not like using rainbows, but I thought it showed the metaphor nicely.
Final Design
The Messy Collage was the favoured design. I was asked to put in some of the stray words from the black hole design. I also cleaned up the desktop background, and decided to add just a bit of that gradient mesh from the Spectroscopy design, to further show the colours blending together in the portal.
I was not entirely sure if the sales head would be okay with me re-colouring the logo for better contrast, but she was okay with it in the end, so I applied that change as well.