Advertising

“Messaging”

People ask me whether I take care of the “messaging” of presentations as well. I do, but I do not really connect to the concept. Maybe it…

Tone down the ambition

Below is a professional print ad for Audi, trying to convince us that its heritage of cars is still present in today’s models.

Hillary’s stock campaign video

The video in which Hillary Clinton announced her intention to run for President is too well executed. The messages are incredibly clear, you can almost reverse engineer the PowerPoint slide that contained the briefing bullet points for the script.

Building signage

I drove by a big office tower the other day that featured a new signage:

• The biggest font size possible, covering the entire width of the building, no (white) space left what so ever.
• As close as possible to the top, no white space here either

Overdoing special effects

Image manipulation software can do a lot, but most of the time it is used over the top. All that technology causes most ads to look worse than those elegant compositions from the 1960s.



First of all there are the clear Photoshop disasters such as this nice composition below (via…

Cover those ads

Screen shots of news articles are useful to give your audience a sense of the sign of the times. To make them look more interesting, I reduce the zoom of the screen to get a nice long, vertical shot of the article with the headline and the newspaper logo still readable. On a page with a non-white…

Anticipation

Most of the time, it is more powerful to show events that are about to happen rather than the event itself. It is very well done in the ad below for an automatic braking system that anticipates the movement of objects on the road. It brings great tension to the visual, almost making the still image move.