The production of this project can be broken up into three distinct sections:
Capture – The capturing of the product, done by using a camera to take a photo of the product.
Construction – The construction of the vector based advert
Manipulation – The alteration of the advert to fit the formats required (poster, newspaper, billboard)
Stage 1 – Capture
For this stage I simply took pictures of my product in a small-scale photography studio. I took around 20-30 Snaps from multiple angles and positions, giving myself as much choice as possible for stage 2 - Manipulation
Here are a couple of example photographs I took.
I also separately constructed this light bulb in Illustrator to be placed in my advert during the construction phase.
Stage 2 – Construction
For this phase I took my product photo (covering the screen with a multi-colour gradient) and placed it against a gradient background of white, turning to blue, turning to black, similar to the ground used by O2 in its advertising campaign. I then placed the Light bulb in a central location of the advert. I did this to ‘equalize’ the adverts appearance after placing the mobile in a upper right quadrant of the page.
I proceeded to add the power cord by thickening a curved line. I gave it first a slight curve, followed by a big drop after extending several inches away from the phone. This was to give the cord a feel of ‘stiffness’ and make it more lifelike. I proceeded to cover the cord with coloured dots – as conceived in my final creative design.
I finished my design by adding in the ‘Illuminating’ tagline and adding a soft colour glow behind both the tagline and the light bulb. The light glow is to draw attention to the advert by having a colour contamination of the yellow and white against the deep blue of the background. The advert is now finished
Step 3 – Manipulation
Step 3 of my production is the manipulation of my layout and page shape in order to fit the format of the adverts placement. Here I’ve changed the positioning of the title, tagline, and the size of the bulb glow in order to fit the shape of the highway billboard.
Here is my advert on a highway billboard. The tagline’s white glow is, unfortunately a little too strong, meaning that the lettering of the word is hard to make out. Also the title is similarly difficult to make out due to the word having a black font and, when placed at the top of the advert, being placed against a dark background. In hindsight, it would have been much better to colour this word grey, avoiding this problem.
I decided to create a second advert, a magazine advert. To do this, I had to manipulate the layout again however, learning from my previous mistake, I placed the title lower so as to catch some of the yellow glow from the light bulb.
I found this picture of a magazine advert from another student and decided to use the shape as guidelines for my own magazine advert.
Splitting the advert in two, I used Photoshop to manipulate the images to form the shape of the magazine pages
I increased the glow for both the bulb and tagline, allowing for the Nokia title to be seen more easily whilst also making the advert more ‘balanced’. I also altered the positioning of the white glow so as to make the tagline more legible.
The results of manipulating my work means that my advert fits comfortably both on magazines and billboards, with more print media potential the advert could be manipulated into. If I was to re-do the advert, I would have chosen a lighter background colour scheme so as to not obscure any words written in a similar colour.
Vector Phone Proposal
Product advertisement ideas
For this project I created several designs of my advert. This was done so that I could cultivate many different ideas in the early stages of the project, before deciding on one and sticking with it. This process would allow my mind to release a lot of its creative potential within a safe environment.
1)
For my first page of designs I split it up into four to maximize the amount of page space I had for my designs. My top two designs are experimenting with a theme between the phone and light/electricity. This created the tagline “Illuminating”. I experiment with the phone layout of the phone and electrical cord (which appears in all the designs) I also add a bulb next to the tagline, reinforcing the idea of light (which means safety and security, a human need). Both the bulb and tagline are to be illuminated in this design.
In the second design, I try to place more importance on the electrical side of the message. I do this by creating the phone in 1’s and 0’s – Binary code. This could be taken to mean electricity (as was my intention) however it has the dual meaning of computing (binary code is the language used to program computers). This could have the hidden meaning of saying that my phone was also technologically advanced – which isn’t a human need, however it is a human desire. (Evidence of this can be seen in the popularity of apple products such as the iphone and ipad.) The last two designs of this page are meant to be a conjoined advert – to be printed inside a magazine (the line in-between them representing the page break) however it could have also been printed on the same side (the left-side one printed on page 14 and the right-side one printed on page 16.) so as to create two ‘conjoined’ adverts.
2)
For my second page, I did the same ‘cross-section’ creating four potential designs instead of one. For this page I wanted to expand on the ‘power cord + bulb’ combo I had discovered on the previous page, with the same tagline ‘Illuminating’ in different styles and layouts. With the first design, I added a sort of ‘radio waves’ coming out of the mobile. I also created the inclusion of four power cords, one jutting out of each of the phones corner’s creating a sort of ‘octopus’ look to the mobile. I continued with this theme throughout all the other designs on this page. The top-right and bottom-left designs are very similar in design, the mobile at one length of the page with the power cords dangling down (or dangling ‘up’) with the lightened word Illuminated equalizing the page’s balance. In the last design, I attempted the design with three power cords instead of four, creating a triangular design. I then experimented with the design’s angles – placing both the phone and word at 45 degrees to the page. This was done due to the human eye automatically scanning a page from top-left to bottom-right. This means that my advert will directly cut across this ‘sight-line’ which will make casual glances stop and look at the advert a second time – attempting to interpret what their eyes find confusing. This gives the advert a ‘second glance’ advantage over other adverts (its also the reason why many shops place sale adverts diagonally)
3)
My third design (and the one I settled on) is a more finalized version of my first design (which through market research turned out to be the most favored design.)
In its revised version, I placed the phone more in shot whilst putting a greater curvature on the cable, giving it a more ’solid’ feel than the incredibly flimsy drawing I had created in the previous version. In this version I also removed the ‘lighting lines’ instead adding a 3-D shadow to the words (although there isn’t any singular light source). However when constructing the final design in illustrator I placed a colour glow behind both the bulb and the tagline. I also removed the flicking curve that’s at the end of the power cord, instead ending at the bulb. These changes make the design more aesthetically appealing to the viewing audience.
4)
My final design is a developed version of the ‘conjoined’ design I created on the first page. I’ve improved on details like the screen and some of the buttons, even adding colour to the receive/hang up buttons. This design is also the first design to feature dotted lights along the power cords, a feature that I included in my final design. The creation of this design in detail helped me to visualize and format my magazine advert placement, with the advert cut straight down the middle. In this design I experimented with multiple bulbs placed horizontally with the picture.
JPEG
A JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group and is mainly used for photographs and paintings with many different and varied tones and colours. The file is also used for Internet files and most commonly for the image format on digital cameras however it is a lossy file so users should be aware that their work might become damaged if repeated compression/decompression of the file takes place.
GIF
A GIF is best suited for art like logos with few, to none contrasting colours, such as text. GIFs are also mainly used for short, three-second animations that are often repeated.
PNG
A PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is an image format that uses lossless data compression, meaning that no visible data is lost when the file is compresses/decompressed.
TIFF
A TIFF or Tagged Image File Format is used for storing images. A TIFF is very flexible and an adaptable file format for handling images and data within a single file. A TIFF file can hold both the lossy JPEG and lossless PackBits.
SVG
A SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a text file that can be searched, indexed, scripted, and compressed however the file also allows for Vector Graphics, Raster Graphics and text. SVG files are best suited for GZIP when compressing the file.
