Advertising

An advertisement is the only kind of graphic design that has to buy its own audience. Nobody opens a magazine to look at the ads, and nobody stands at a bus stop hoping for a poster. The work has to earn attention in the second or two it is given, deliver one idea that a stranger will remember, and do it in a voice the client can keep using for years. That is a harder brief than it sounds.

This note takes you from the client brief to the finished campaign: how to find the single proposition worth saying, how a message is ranked so the eye reads it in the right order, how one idea is stretched across a poster, a phone screen and a six-second film without falling apart, and how every execution feeds the corporate identity behind it. You will critique real campaigns and real student work, and you will see what an examiner is looking for when advertising is the route you take through a theme.