Advertising by Design, 3rd Edition

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COMPOSITION BY DESIGN

Underlying any effective advertising is a good idea—the creative reasoning that calls people to action. The advertising idea drives your copy (words), design, and art direction—how you visualize, design, and art direct photography or illustration, why you choose typefaces and select or create images, and the reasoning underlying your color palette. In the following chapters, we will examine how to generate ad ideas and explore advertising fundamentals. To begin, this chapter is a primer on composition so that you can start sketching right after you read about idea generation.

If you want to communicate your idea—the advertising message—first you have to grab someone’s attention. Well-designed compositions and arresting imagery (figure 2-1) and typography grab people’s attention across media channels. To grab as well as keep someone’s attention, the composition must give coherent form to the content. The structure of the composition is how the content is ordered and positioned. Interesting form results from a good idea communicated through a finely honed composition and visualization, specifically how you create the imagery and type.

Composition is the form, the whole spatial property and structure, resulting from the arrangement of graphic elements (type and images) in relation to one another and to the format (boundary edges and shape of the screen or page, etc.). For each and every composition, you use formal elements (line, shape, color, value, and ...