“Congratulations, it’s a Golf” – My First Step Into Creative Advertising

In this blog, I will be sharing my first ever Advertising project designs that took place in my first year of college and remains in my portfolio as a pinnacle of my aspirations for my future in Creative Advertising.

In this project, I produced an Ad Campaign based on a vehicle of my choice (Volkswagen Golf) and the target audience for the product (young fathers that want to stay feeling cool). my ideas generation consisted of up to thirteen thumbnail sketch ideas using different slogans and imagery in each idea. Out of the thirteen ideas I generated, I decided on the idea with the slogan “Congratulations, it’s a Golf” as it was undoubtedly the most creative idea with it re-imagining the saying of a doctor congratulating parents on their new born baby and turns the table by making it about the product vehicle, making it plausible memorable.

From this idea, I managed to produced three different outcomes of which have their own unique flare. The first outcome was a scamp illustrated to a standard to be presented to a client, meaning it has an exceptional amount of detail and clearly convey the imagery of a family photo with the Golf being focused on in the background. The Second outcome, I used a portrait image of a sleeping baby, which I edited a Golf car key into the baby’s hand. Third and final outcome is a landscape image of a hand holding pregnancy test with the Volkswagen logo in the pregnancy test. In each of the outcomes, I placed the slogan in the bottom corner of the design with the Volkswagen logo to allow the art direction to speak for itself before the audience acknowledges the slogan.

This Advertising project is extremely important to me as it is the very project that had drawn me into Creative Advertising from the beginning and led me to develop an interest, which ultimately developed into a passion for Creative Advertising and I continue learn and create for my future in Creative Advertising.

Pioneers of the Creative Industry

There is an ernormous scale of creativity that is naturally unravelled upon the creative community, and with creativity comes inspiration. In this blog, I will be sharing examples of pioneer of the creative industry that consistantly inspire creatives across the globe as well as me personally as a student who aspires to enter advertising in the creative industry.

Robert Stromberg – The famous Art Director, Filmmaker and Special Effects Artist Robert Stromberg is profoundly one of the most talented creatives on a global scale and has the background to prove it. Stromberg is best known for his Art Direction in films such as James Cameron’s Avatar, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and Disney’s Maleficent, the former two earning him Academy Award wins for Best Art Direction.

Stromberg is also a majorly responsible creative for the re-imagined story of the fable – The Tortoise and the Hare, which he brought the idea to the table for producing the Mercedes Benz “Fable” commercial and made his directorial debut with the commercial as the director of commercial as a whole.

Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF–p4Dkv_Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjfVp19Tu1M

OK GO – The famous four man band is a brilliant example of re-inventing how to express music and introduce a new way to connect with fans. OK GO is a band that is talented in media beyond music as they are well known for their one shot music video performances for songs such as “Here It Goes Again” and “End Love”.

The band has also had a few opportunities to partner with companies to promote their product/campaign through their music videos; a great example of this would be their “The One Moment” music video that was shot in 4.2 seconds and was slowed down to make a four minute and thirteen second video. The lead singer and director of “The One Moment” music video heavily engaged and guided his ideas and expressed a distinct passion for creativity for this project with the rest of the band and the team they were associated with. The band was in collaboration with Morton Salt when making this music video to promote the hashtag #WalkHerWalk.

Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvW61K2s0tA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dFdNUz2cQc

Craig Ward – The hugely innovative and inspiring Typography Artist and Designer Craid Ward is undoubtedly one of the most iconic and memorable creatives. Craig is best known for his Typography designs such as “Ink and Water Don’t Mix”, Craig has a tendency to design his typography to convey and visualise the imagery that the word and lettering narrate.

Craig Ward has had a lot of partnerships with companies to collaborate for a campaign or simply to commerce. A great example of one of the collaboratively campaigns Craig had a part in would be his collaboration with McCann to create a series of poster and banner adverts for a Christmas campaign in 2016 to promote MasterCard’s Holiday Lounge in Columbus Circle, New York City.

Sources: http://wordsarepictures.co.uk/

Frame Animation – Easy and Effective Way to Create Your Own Animated World

Animation has a long history that goes further back than 1928, which dates back to Disney’s short film and first notable breakthrough, Steamboat Willie, the third of the Mickey Mouse series. Many wrongly believe this Phonofilm to be the first cartoon with synchronised sound when it was, in fact, Paul Terry’s “Dinner Time” but was left unrecognised and unsuccessful.

In this current era, animation is extremely varied in media, ranging in multiple forms of 2D and 3D animation, digital and non-digital. I personally find that 2D digital frame animation is one of the easiest methods of animation and one of the least time consuming methods. Frame animation is a brilliant introduction into digital animation as it uses many tools and resources such as sprites, shapes and colour for you to create a simple, yet effective animation. Making a frame animation helps gather an understanding of frames per second, movement between frames and tools like onion skinning to help correctly animate the movement of a character or object.

I made a very short clip using frame animation as a basic step-by-step process, which involved making just up to 20 or more frames. The animation consists of a ninja character with multiple sprites of the character running and jumping and a landscape of buildings that were made from generated shapes. I used onion skinning throughout the process to determine the distance that the ninja character would move between each frame aswell as the angle and direction it would move based on whether character would be jumping in the air or not.

What I liked about making this frame animation is that although it is very simplistic, the illusion that frames create fill in the gaps that weren’t actually made so it flows smoothly because of the trick of the eye. You can find the animation I made via the link below.

My Frame Animation: https://www.facebook.com/lee.hughes.35380399/videos/2035338363425596/?notif_id=1549574162600651&notif_t=video_processed

Graphic Design: Your Creative Journey To Success

Graphic design is a creative aspect of communicating information, ideas and solution through the art of imagery and lettering.

Fifteen is a great example of a graphic design agency that has a profoundly large team of creatives. They have covered this topic in an exceptionally informative blog they made 2 years ago.

The working conditions for graphic design would typically be designing a variety of ideas and products such as websites, packaging and advertising, the process of this work would involve long periods of working on a computer. The environment in graphic design would be studio/office based if working in an agency or home based if freelancing, travel would usually be required when meeting clients.

What is the difference between in-house, agency and freelance?

In-houses are teams within large organisations, for example, publishers, retailers, universities, packaging companies and banks. They benefit from higher salaries and easier internal progression but have generally less creative freedom and variety.

Agencies are teams that seek out and serve a wide range of clients, they may specialise in areas like advertising, corporate communications or just general graphic design. They benefit from more expectations of work variation, but have a likelyhood of a lower salary and less internal progression.

Freelance is highly similar to Agency work, however, you will be working completely independant. It is your responsibility to seek clients and complete the work on your own, but at least the benefit of Freelance work is that you have the freedom to pick and choose jobs that interest you most.

How do you progress to succeed?

Once you have a storng portfolio from your history of work experience, qualifications and skills in art-related subjects such as illustration, you are ready to enter into the graphic design business.
It is also important that you have an enthusiastic and positive attitude to help you progress through the industry.

Below illustrates the common career paths within the design industry:

Progression Tips

  • The main route to successful progression is by; developing a reputation, networking and making contacts.
  • Developing your career further depends on frequent job movement in order to widen experience and develop your portfolio. You need to think strategically about any moves you make.
  • Smaller companies rarely have a career structure, but they may have a better work environment than larger companies. You may want to go freelance/self-employed to progress your career.
    • Junior Graphic Designers generally progress after 2 or 3 years.
    • Graphic Designers generally progress between 3 to 5 years.
    • A lot of designers choose to go Freelance/Self-Employed within 5 to 10 years of having their first job.

Final Tips

  • Ensure your CV is typographically great with a clear layout and no spelling errors or incorrect spacing. Giving it a creative design can be helpful but it is risky.
  • Work on your Portfolio – Sometimes try tailoring it to the design company you’re applying to.
  • Get as much experience as possible!
  • Network, network, network.
  • Learn and train as you go! Always make sure to keep up-to-date with the latest design software available.
  • Be very enthusiastic and positive

Sources:

Adobe Sensei – AI and the Creative Industry, Together as One

On 2nd November 2016, Adobe Sensai was first introduced to the public eye. The aptly-named ‘guru’ is a framework and set of intelligent services for improving design and delivery of digital experience. It harnesses machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning capabilities. Available across the Adobe Cloud Platform; Creative Cloud, Adobe Document Cloud and Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Sensei tackles experience challenges faced by creatives and customers by automating mundane tasks, driving predictive and personalisation capabilities.

Adobe Sensei makes sense of Adobe’s massive volume of content and data assets from high resolution images in Creative Cloud, digital documents in Document Cloud; and data analytics in Marketing Cloud. For example, Adobe Sensei uses deep learning to search and tag images automatically. When you search for stock images in Adobe Stock for instance, it makes intelligent recommendations, matching colour, layout, format, understanding context, needless to say, it hugely takes visual browsing into account.

In Face Aware Editing, Adobe Sense can identify faces in an image, using “landmarks”, referring to the features, contours and characteristics of a human face, like eyebrows, lips and eyes to understand their position. This makes retouching easier when, for example, changing skin tone or changing facial expression without concern of ruining the design.

An intriguing example showcases semantic segmentation. Each image region can be labelled with its type. When you’re editing an image, Adobe Sensei can recognise objects and scenery such as the sky or a building, or a person. Labelled regions allow you to easily make a selection and manipulate objects. Using simple commands like “change the sky.”

This is also an extroadinary opportunity for creative advertisers! Billions of data points and decisions inform a typical search campaign, from thousands of keywords across multiple properties to targeting parameters like audience, device, geography, time of day and more. It would be deemed impossible for humans to sift through such a large scale of data and make optimal decisions on budget allocation and bid optimization to get the best possible results.

To solve these problems, Adobe introduced Adobe Advertising Cloud Search with easy-to-use workflows, unique data access and artificial intelligence. The offering is designed to save advertisers time and increase ROI (Return On Investment).

Adobe Advertising Cloud Search is simplifying the process for using audience targeting in search marketing. The advancements are the first in the industry to couple audiences from a leading marketing technology stack, Adobe Experience Cloud, with AI and machine learning to drive higher returns for advertisers. Adobe Sensei, the company’s AI and machine learning framework, is at the center of new optimization capabilities. With granular engagement metrics from Adobe Analytics, as well as audiences from Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Campaign, Adobe Advertising Cloud Search leverages Adobe Sensei to inform bid optimization, simulations and forecasting decisions.

AI – A Threat to the Creative Industry?

For many professionals, the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) is, needless to say, a frightening prospect. This also draws in concern and question for the future of Creative Industries, does the Creative Industry have a future for people in the Creative Industry? The end result could be more efficient creatives or lazier creatives, but the biggest fear is the possibility of creatives being replaced entirely by machines capable of imitating uniquely human creative skills.
When it comes to Advertising Agencies in particular, the debates of the advancement of AI dive as deep as the rest of the creative industries. Arguments aside, it’s a fact that AI is already changing advertising in more ways than one with search, audience targeting, consumer analysis etc. However, this may not ultimately be a positive thing. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to change the way agencies work. Agencies need to brace for downsizing due to AI. This will happen primarily in the account planning and media planning/buying departments. AI can use historical data and current data as well as industry data to create robust, objective and accurate plans.
Personally, I believe AI is not necessarily a concern or threat to Advertising Agencies nor is it a threat to the Creative industry as a whole though it will be a longer process for them to accept AI as there is evidence of AI created art is being auctioned at Christie’s, New York. As for Advertising Agencies, I think they should see AI as an opportunity to rise rather than to fall, people would work alongside creatives, allowing creatives further access to research and resources and generate more from their work. Also despite AI’s capabilities, it lacks the ability to truly learn emotional quotient, which to a positive standard can differ creatives to AI, putting creative at an advantage in the creative field.