AD CAMPAIGN

October 12, 2018

AD CAMPAIGN

DESIGNING AN ADVERT FOR A NEW EDUCATION PROGRAMME

I thought about what I would find useful in terms of educational programmes and considered my options. See Figure 1, a photo of my mindmap below. Learning a new language was a very attractive proposition. As was developing art and design skills, such as lithographic printing and spending more of my leisure time in developing drawing skills. Language and sports activities were also considerations. In the end, I decided upon focusing upon life-skills.

Figure 1: Mindmap

Once I had made this decision, I started to think about who I would want to attract as potential students. This was difficult, as I thought that anyone and everyone would be interested. I thought that courses like 'mindfulness' might be very useful — these have become increasingly popular in recent years amongst folk of all ages.

Once I had a better idea of what the content of the life-skills programme might be, I had to decide upon a name for the course and the provider of the programme. I thought about words that might be attractive: 'happy', 'healthy', 'well', and 'improve' all came to mind. In the end I decided upon calling the programme simply 'Life Skills'. After thinking about using words like 'university' or 'college', I decided upon the most inclusive nouns I could think of — 'school' and 'life'. So, the 'School of Life' was created.... at least on paper!

Then came the more difficult task (for me) of deciding upon what images to use and what to use for a tag-line and a logo. I played around with a few ideas (see photo below, which is a page from my notebook) and wrote out 'School of Life' a few times. Then I realised that the acronym for 'School of life' was in fact S.O.L. 'Sol' is of course 'sun' in Latin and in Spanish! We get the English word 'solar' from it, and the French word for sun is 'soleil'. Of course, the next step was relatively easy, as deciding upon what the logo should look like was simply a matter of deciding how to introduce the concept of 'sol' or 'sun' through the design process. I quickly sketched a couple of ideas (see Figure 2) and then began to play around with the results on Pxlr.com. I created one triangular ray using the polygonal lasso tool and then duplicated that layer. I then used 'free transform' on the 'edit' menu to rotate and move each copied ray shape into place. Once I was happy with the result I saved the image as a JPEG and began to think about the tag-line/slogan/strap-line... the words I could use a 'hook' to interest potential 'students' in the 'Life Skills' programme at (the imaginary) School of Life.

Figure 2. Logo ideas

I thought about all the different ways people wish each other well. I remembered Dr Spock (from Star Trek) and how he used to say 'Live long and prosper' as a way of saying goodbye to people. Also, song lyrics, like Bobby McFerrin's 'Don't Worry, Be Happy', which was a hit song when I was at art school in the 1980s. Eventually, I decided to combine these two phrases into 'Live long, be happy'. What more could anyone hope for from life?

Now I had the concept/product/service, the logo and the tag-line all ready, I simply had to write a few lines about the course itself, so that potential applicants to the educational programme might be more informed. So I wrote a short description of the course, including some 'teasers' for the programme content. I then added these elements to the 'pasteboard' on my computer screen and began to play around with the composition of the different elements. I decided upon a landscape format (as opposed to portrait format) as I wanted to reinforce (very subtly) the 'sol'/'sun' concept. After all, the sun moves across the landscape! I hope you like the final result (Figure 3).