Watts Tower ad info

My designer is David Carson, my ad will be in the OC Weekly.

A full page ad in the Weekly is 9.25" x 11.25".

I chose grid number 3 from the list and the ad I saw that was scanned in that I would most likely emulate is the WeSC Warehouse Sale ad.

My slogan is: "Design your future. Get animated."

It will be to promote the programs of Graphic Design and Animation provided by CalArts that take place year round at the Towers. It will be aimed at high school to college aged students to get them interested in a future in art as a career.
I had no plans of going to college in high school since I found nothing that interested me until I realized I could make art a career through graphic design.

Bad Ad Final

Here is my completed final ad for the bad ad campaign.

Watts Tower Photos

    These are a few of the 20 or so photos I took of the Watts tower. I found the tower to be interesting and its history is very cool. Although, the area it is in is pretty sketchy and not very inviting. If it wasn't for the tower and this assignment I would have never stepped foot in Watts. Although, the whole thing I felt was very cool and the security was very nice. I don't think they should tear it down for a skateboard park, there was plenty of room for that behind the tower park. Also, there is a skatepark 10 minutes away via freeway in Bell.

Bad Ad redo: rough draft stage

    This is the ad I chose to recreate from bad to good. I was told what this probably was/is a space holder ad. Where a company will advertise in a magazine, newspaper, etc. throughout the year and have about 9 months of small space holder ad's (above) and when they have a big holiday or special coming up they get the same rate for 3 months of big ad's (full page 4th of July deals for example). So obviously  no real thought went into this ad if thats the case.

    So I took the ad which has really bland type (which isn't terrible in most cases), since the type is all the same and the font is quite boring and nothing really stands out. The hierarchy is all wrong. The location information should be third. This ad should really read from biggest (most important) to smallest (least important) in terms of images and text. So in my mind it should read: logo, food served, locations and website.


    Below are my 10 rough drafts I threw together playing with the ideas of larger text, an easier text to read, something more familiar but not a sans serif type face. I played with the type size and boldness placement and information. Also I found the ad to be completely redundant from the beginning with the logo saying "Seafood Restaurants" and the very next thing you read is "Premium Seafood". So for every ad except one I removed the word Seafood from the logo and left it just as "McCormick and Schmick's: Restaurants"

    The roughs gave me a good idea for placement and ideas for using the addresses of the locations and phone numbers. Although, due to the size of the ad and the different type sizes, bolds, italics and different type faces didn't transfer as well in just pen and paper roughs. I could have littered the page with all the notes I had in my head. Instead I went ahead and did a quick digital version of each of my ideas and included that as well. From these 10 quick digital roughs I can pick each of them apart and use the elements I like the most and recreate it in one final piece. One thing I noticed very much in the final printed version of these digital versions is due to the size of the ad the type face must be bigger or the information gets lost if it is too small. That can be fixed in the second round of roughs I create. Then off to the final product.