Publication Ads project

With this magazine ad, my goal was to create something that would appeal to my audience, which included a very wide age range. I had to try to make something that was appealing to beginning motorcyclists as well as those that had already been in the sport for a while. I chose to let the photo do most of the talking and use short bits of catchy text to accent the ideas I wanted to get across regarding the product.

Demographics

My next consideration was balance. Even though the picture that I used of the motorcycle was at an angle, I wanted to sort of divide the image in half, which I did by placing two different backgrounds behind it--one of a highway and one of a dirt road. When I created the thumbnail sketches and roughs, I had that divided photo in mind.

Thumbs

Though there were many ways to divide the image and keep the design balanced, I decided to divide the image vertically in the center, which kept the reader's eye drawn to the picture of the motorcycle. One other tactic I used was to create a duo-tone raster from the image and use bright text to draw attention to the company logo I created and to the text describing the product.

Large Ad Rough

Small Ad Rough

For the large ad, the finished product turned out much like the rough. I chose not to alter the concept very visibly. However, I did change the small ad quite a bit. It became just a downsized version of the large ad. I did this to promote unity between the two ads, because they would probably be run fairly close together in the publication. I chose to use a variant of the Helvetica type face to keep the "clean" feeling of the design. I experimented with using different type faces with the logo in the lower right-hand corner, but Helvetica looked the best after all. To make the type look a bit more logo-like, I adjusted the kerning and leading so that the words and individual characters were quite a bit closer to each other than they would be in their normal form.

Finished Large Ad

Finished Small Ad

 Overall, I was very pleased with how each ad turned out. Creating the ad gave me a lot of good practice using Photoshop, and it made me realize all of the neat things I can do to manipulate an image to fill a certain need in a design. I cut out the photo of the motorcycle from one photo, and the background is composed of two other, distinctly different images. Combining all three took some time, but the finished product had the look and feel I wanted to project to my target audience.

Photography--A Review, Going Wild

At the technology conference, I attended Dr. Robert C. Wiseman's presentation on basic photography. Dr. Wiseman presented the audience with basic knowledge on how a camera works and why knowing how to use the manual camera settings in this age of modern automation is so important.

Dr. Wiseman sharing bits of wisdom

Dr. Wiseman showed the audience several samples of his photography work, most of which was done with film cameras and carefully produced in a darkroom. Dr. Wiseman showed us photos done with Kodak high-contrast film, which gives the picture a really neat black and white, textured look.

Near the end of his presentation, Dr. Wiseman showed us how to simulate the look that one gets with using high-contrast film in Photoshop with a digital photograph. One simply must adjust the brightness/contrast levels several times until the desired effect is reached. It was really interesting to see how to create that same effect without spending hours in the darkroom working with physical film. It made me realize how easy we have it today. Photographers in former times had to spend hours upon hours developing techniques that would give their photos a creative edge on the competition. What took them hours and maybe even days takes us a few minutes and a click or two in Photoshop.

While modern technology is wonderful, efficient and often simple to use, Dr. Wiseman's presentation reminded me that, though technological advancements are useful, there is still much that we can learn by examining and learning about the way things were done by photographers of the past. Wiseman mentioned that, to be a good photographer, a person must understand the way the camera works in order to produce creative, effective work.