Brandenburg Telephone Company - Ad
This advertiser published ads in our newspaper every week. Often they had a few prompts for us to follow (indicating their 4 service areas, stressing local company, etc.). Occasionally they had provided graphics or mockups for us to reference but over time the creative duties were entirely on my team. They would approve a set of two ads to alternate for one month (often alternating the layout or ad size) and during that time we would design the next set. My partner and I would alternate design duties.
The customer did prompt us to indicate that their latest Gigabit speeds were the fastest in the area. I was lucky that I had designed some graphics for earlier ads that I could carry over into the new one (the digital honeycomb background) and also their fonts were consistent with their previous work.
The ad size was 2 column (or 3.22 inches) by 9 inches. All of our newspaper design work was technically measured in Columns (width) by Inches (length) in order to help with page layout as each column was 1.61 inches.
I decided to add a bit of a slant to some of the copy to make it seem like it was moving towards the future. It's a little corny, sure, but I remember that thought in my head and it was different than the rest of the static horizontal text.
I had seen other ads showing internet speeds with speedometers but I didn't want some generic speedometer from a car. I wanted something futuristic and glossy, possibly showing some code inside the display, like some weird fusion of digital and analog display technology. It took some time searching stock websites but in the end it was very much worth it. I believe the source image came from Adobe Stock (but it may have been another stock site) but it only showed speeds in Kilobits per Second rather than Gigabits per Second (it was a bit old).
No worries, I saved the stock photo to my Adobe Cloud account. I jumped into Photoshop on my iPad and started cloning and painting out the bits that didn't work (references to "Kbps", "Kilobits", and all the main numbers on the gauge) but I also had to clean up the surrounding area so there were no obvious gaps between the code behind everything. It required a little bit of cloning and scaling to rebuild the background of the gauge. I used Photoshop on my iPad because my Cintiq was back at home and I wanted a stylus to make this work go faster. Then I hopped back into Illustrator on the PC, placed the image from Adobe Cloud, and reset all of the necessary text as needed. It required some distortion to match the perspective of the original text that I removed.
This was a fun ad because I had flexed some design muscles that I have not used in a long time. This was some of my best digital painting outside of comic book art. The customer really liked this ad campaign and actually ran this ad for several weeks which made me proud of my work. They actually came back to this ad to run again after a short break so it makes me feel like I did some quality work.
