Print Ads for Restaurants

Here’s another round-up of ads our team worked on. (Yes, we work on more than food ads, but those seem to catch my attention most.)

I have had this ad filed away for a long time, to use in the right post. I love how the food takes center stage, and that picture just makes me dizzy with hunger. They kept the copy minimal (but right on target) and just let the picture do the talking.

Writing an Effective Creative Brief for a Design Project

A creative brief is almost like a roadmap for how a project will turn out. It is the best chance to set the tone of your project so it starts off in the right direction. Your design will be only as good as your brief.

I remember a quote from a seminar on writing good briefs conducted by the Philippine Association of National Advertisers (PANA): “It is the miracle and magic of advertising that a structured, formal document can produce communication that touches people emotionally.”

There are all types of creative briefs and methods for developing them. The approach you use is less important than the mission: communicate clearly and thoroughly what you want. In other words, provide detailed instructions.

Affinity Express has order management systems (AESB and IDEA) that guide our clients through all the critical details, from size to folding specifications to fonts that must be used. Essentially, our technical team created an electronic client brief to make it easier for clients to communicate. We give them an area for “Additional Instructions” in which they can write anything that might help inform the designers. They can also attach as many reference documents as possible to show styles they like, old versions of documents, color combinations that work well and more.

Whether you are a client and use Affinity Express or not, here is what you should include in your creative brief for your internal team members and outside providers.

News Publishers’ Business Model for Digital Success

The addition of digital agency services is something that every local media company should consider in 2012.

 – “The Local Digital Ad Agency: Emerging Opportunity for Innovative Media Companies,” the Local Media Innovation Alliance, December 2011

To better serve local advertisers and compete for online advertising dollars, adding digital agency services is a major opportunity for news publishers, but achieving profitability is the real challenge.

Some newspapers are trying to build the internal capability and capacity to provide a range of digital production services. Many are discovering this is quite expensive operating overhead to carry and it just doesn’t make economic sense. Publishers find it is extremely difficult to outlay new capital to fund the production resources needed, and to do it in such a way that yields positive operating margins.

Another important consideration is that SMB advertisers are highly price sensitive and the price points required to sell high volumes of online marketing services must be extremely competitive.

Despite these challenges, newspapers have had no choice but to plunge into digital services: display ads, iPad ads, websites, mobile, social and video services to balance declining revenues from print. They have to juggle two roles: that of news and content provider to their readers (whether via print or online media) and that of marketing agencies to their customers, providing both digital and print services and helping small-business owners find their way in online marketing.

“Visual Marketing”: the Book

As a marketer in the business of advertising and marketing design, I was intrigued when I first heard of the book Visual Marketing, and I was glad to get my hands on it. The premise of the book is both exciting and unoriginal: that visuals have as much to do with marketing as copy or sound is of course, well recognized, and has been used to great effect by advertisers and marketers alike. This book, however, is about visual marketing in the new world of online media: so it is infographics, web design, apps and games that take the center stage along with logos, signs, banners, print mailers and business cards—and thankfully, there isn’t a TV ad in sight.

Yet this isn’t a graphic design book: in fact, some of the examples deal with copy or an interesting business name, making the point that all the elements of marketing go hand in hand and are most effective when they all work together to enforce the message.

Pink and Red: Valentine’s Day Ads

Whether you love it or hate it, Valentine’s Day is here once again. From a design perspective, this can be a challenging holiday, as there are a limited number of symbols or images and colors used. And we recently heard a bit of proactive advice from one of our clients: we should be careful not to overdo a theme because it can undermine the effectiveness of an ad.

Below are some of the designs we completed for clients in anticipation of this day dedicated to showing those we love how much we care.

Flowers are one of the most common gifts given on Valentine’s Day. I just heard a statistic on the news that two-thirds of the flowers purchased by men are given to their wives or girlfriends. One-third are given to their mothers! Anyway, featuring the flowers in this ad makes it eye-catching and bright. You can see here the typical approach of using reds and pinks on this holiday (purples are also seen although less frequently).

Getting Line and Paragraph Spacing Just Right in Your Document

Line and paragraph spacing can make a lot of difference to the look of a document, yet it’s often overlooked. In this post, I share some really simple tips on spacing and how to get it right.

The standard spacing strategy is to use a decreasing amount of space as you move down the document.

The space between the title block and the text that follows should be the greatest: that sets the title apart from the rest of the document. The space between a section heading and the body text that follows it should be more than the space between the lines of text that after the heading. Following this simple spacing rule will make the document easy for your readers to follow.

Designs of the Quarter: Pre-Media and Print Ads

Once again in Q4 of 2011, we called for submissions to our Designs of the Quarter contest. This time, we did not limit the categories, so all Affinity Express designers could participate. We were pleased with the response and the committee selected these four to feature. For the first time, we had two winning entries from the same person, who is clearly a design superstar in the making!

Oasis Cafe

Check marks the spot—in coffee beans on the cover of this menu, which is an interesting device to incorporate the main product in the design in a fresh way. It is reinforced by the coffee cup at the bottom. The brown, black and white color scheme works well for a coffee-oriented restaurant and the layout is clean and easy to read, despite there being a lot of text.

10 Steps to Keeping Marketing Communications Updated

At the start of the year, every marketing department needs to update their materials and documents and make sure they’re ready to use. Now that I’m done with mine, I put together a checklist that you can use too.