Production

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 added the Nokia name and the model’s type number. During my research, I could not find a version of the Nokia Typography that would download and work. To get around this, I had to find a picture of the alphabet in the font. I then took screen shots of each picture individually before connecting them together to form the words Nokia N001.

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.