For this project, I was instructed to find a poorly designed ad, billboard, website etc. And redesign it using the Elements and Principles of Typography. After searching the internet I ended up finding a badly designed real estate ad to do my project on. The reason the original ad was distasteful was because one, it used over 5 different fonts in a variation of different colors, along with an unappealing black box behind some text to make it stand out more. A second rule that wasn't followed was alignment. It wasn't used very well as it was all just centered on the page. And three, although there was only one picture chosen for the ad, as there was supposed to be, it was just unpleasant to look at. It went along with the wording of the ad, but it used less then appropriate words; "Bag The Perfect Home". I improved this ad first off by taking all the key information that I needed, and typed them all in diffetent text boxes so that they could all be moved separately around the advertisement. I also took the logo from the original ad and made it bigger and improved the font used by using a more clear, yet similar, text to make it easier to read. Now it was time to redesign the ad into something more presentable.
First I narrowed the amount of typefaces down to two. I gave the larger more elegant font a dark green color with a black thin stroke (outline) so that it was somewhat related to the original colour scheme. Next I changed the picture to something more exciting then a house in a bag. I ended up choosing a nice little house in someone's hand with a crisp white background, making the house stand out much better than having, say, a green background. The new choice in picture also let me change the slogan which originally said "Bag The Perfect Home", to "The perfect house at the palm of your hand!" |
The last principal of typography that I chose to redo, was the alignment. Instead of centering everything in the middle of the page, most text ended up to the left and right of the ad, arranged around the image of the house, contact information the only thing not attached to the sides, making it stand out all the more as some of the most important information. Last thing I did to improve the design was that I added a strip of light green at the top with the name of the real estate agent on top. This brought the ad together by adding a little bit of colour so that the entire background wasn't just a blank white.
The hardest part of this project was deciding where I wanted the text to go. I had started off with the slogan at the top with the real estate agents name underneath, but it didn't quite look right, so I switched it around and it made it a bit better. The real thing that finished the ad off though, was the picture. At first when ever I made it bigger the picture became pixelated so I tried to keep it small. That didn't work so I found a bigger version of the same image, and the larger house image made the ad look complete. All and all, I think the ad turned out very well and looks quite professional, and a whole lot better then the original one did. |