You can’t be good at everything. The skill is to work with someone who is good at what you are not.
The best choice of type or color palette or photography or illustration can’t save a bad idea. Concept is to advertising what the little black dress is to fashion: it will always be in demand.
Advertising Concept Book (Second Edition) by Pete Barry
Critiquing any creative idea will often produce a variety of conflicting opinions. Ads are no different: it’s a very subjective, rather than objective, art form. In fact, you can criticize anything creative if you really want to. Nothing is universally perfect.
Advertising Concept Book (Second Edition) by Pete Barry
It has been said that being a good art director is simply about looking at things differently from everyone else. A poster should be something nobody has seen before- that’ll get it attention.
Advertising Concept Book (Second Edition) by Pete Barry
Give your solutions the overnight test. When you return to the problem, your judgment will be clearer, and your editing skills will be sharper. This is your subconscious at work. Or as art director Steve Montgomery often says, ‘I’m thinking about it even when I’m not thinking about it.
Advertising Concept Book (Second Edition) by Pete Barry
What is the benefit of your particular product or service? Note that I used the word ‘benefit’ rather than ‘benefits.’ It’s very important that you communicate one benefit. In other words, what is the single most important thing about your product: what could its major strength be, which hopefully sets it apart from your competitors?
Advertising Concept Book (Second Edition) by Pete Barry
You have only seconds to get your message across.
You have to be single-minded.
Advertising Concept Book (Second Edition) by Pete Barry
What do you want to say? This is perhaps the most important thing to determine before you start the advertising creative process.
Advertising Concept Book (Second Edition) by Pete Barry
In terms of producing ads, the best strategic, creative team (or individual) is one that/who possesses a balance of logic and imagination, verbal and visual skills, etc. (Many creative teams resemble the classic funny guy/straight guy comedy team, where each member is almost totally reliant on the other in order for their act to succeed).
Advertising Concept Book (Second Edition) by Pete Barry
So great are the demands clients make on designers for high levels of knowledge and expertise that design is becoming increasingly – and irrevocably – compartmentalized.
As consumers, media actually affects a lot of things about us personally. Our sense of self-worth and importance. This is really impactful when you think about the characters that you see on screen and how you are always kind of upholding yourself to them; they kind of set this bar.
There are companies who wave the green flag and pretend to be green, when in reality they do nothing. Graphic designers are the first people companies turn to, to help create the illusion of greenness. When businesses do this it’s called ‘greenwashing,’ and it leaves a bitter taste when we encounter it.
Helvetica is a surprisingly difficult typeface to use becaues it is unforgiving. It looks best in single-word applications or short phrases. When it is used in a mix of sizes and weights its fabled robustness tends to evaporate.
Consider how your copy lines can be brought to life with imagery and graphics, and be prepared to adjust your copy to facilitate the design treatment. One element must dominate the page, and if this is going to be a visual image your copy may have to be more passive.
Copywriting for Design, Advertising, and Marketing by Mark Shaw
Blocks of justified text look neat and tidy, but as every designer knows justified text requires lots of manual correction. Using justified text in Web design is even more problematic because hypenation properties of software can never be relied on. For the foreseeable future, the legibility of your Web documents will suffer if you set your text in justified format.
Default design is making use of the preordained settings found in common design programs such as Quark, Photoshop, and Illustrator that a user (or designer) must manually override. Put simply, defaults automate certain aspects of the design process.