Designing An Advertising Campaign Is Hard

For this project we had to design an advertising campaign for diversity and it was really really difficult. I now have so much respect for people who do this as a job because holy crap this was hard. Designing the posters was actually the easiest bit of this because you also had to create the tag line and what you wanted the poster to be about.

DESIGNING AN ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN

The problem with advertising diversity is there is so many different things you could do it about. We were given a talk about diversity but it was still extremely difficult and I ended up trying to create something about invisible illnesses just because that was something I had some experience with.

The first idea I had was to not judge people by what you see and I tried to compare that to judging a book by it’s cover but I didn’t like that idea. I was going to incorporate that really popular thing just now where you pick a book based on a few key words without actually knowing what it is or what it’s about. Like I said I wasn’t a fan of this idea.

I wanted to stay with the book idea though so I started looking a book quotes. I’ve always loved the quote from the end of Deathly Hallows Harry is asking Dumbledore if them meeting on Platform 9 and 3/4s is actually real. I thought this could be a good way of explaining invisible illnesses. After looking for more similar quotes it became clear that they were more focused towards mental health problems so I started changing my tag line again to fit in with that.

DEVELOPMENT

Designing the actual poster was quite easy, I wanted it to have a hand drawn style because I’ve been really liking that recently. I scanned my sketches into the computer but because they are hand drawn it was really difficult to make changes to them. Eventually I gave up on that idea and used a script font instead.

It was really important that all three posters looked like they fit into the same campaign. I ended up doing this by using the same colours over the three posters. As well as having the same layout and typefaces.

FINALLY

I wasn’t massively happy with the final designs. The adverts look okay and you can tell they are part of the same campaign. I just wasn’t happy with the tag lines, I think the idea is important. But there could have been a better way of getting that across. And of course because I used book quotes which wouldn’t be possible in a real advertising campaign.