When a message connects with you deeply, it’s more than just the words. It’s how those words are presented (type, weight, color, etc.). It’s how the visual amplifies the message and maybe even a secondary meaning of the message. It’s the design that balances it all, emphasizing the elements that need emphasizing. Understanding when to fill a space and when to leave it alone.
Today’s amazing resources
We all have access to some amazing tools that democratize the ability to create. We can build a layout or select a template to customize. We can choose fonts, specifying their weights and sizes. We can play with color. We can search collections of photos, graphics, animation, and video and add them to our creation. We can do all these things. And often for free.
On top of it all, there are exponentially more places to display an ad today than when I first started in this business. So with all of this available to us, why is there such a dearth of awesome messages/ads?
A trip down memory lane
Back in the day (80 or so years ago), ads followed a fairly standard formula. Find some words to describe some feature of your product you’d like to highlight. Then throw in a smiling person (look, they like our product!) and a logo.
