Color in Advertising and Design

What is the dominant color or colors within your company? What do you use for your logo, printed materials, your ads and on your website? Why have you chosen these colors? Do you think these choices make sense?

Color is one of the most fundamental tools for designers of all types. Color is used to create moods, contrast and also harmony. You want to choose company colors that make sense for your type of business—don’t just make choices based on your personal preference. Think of the complex meaning of different colors. White is clean and pure. Blue is sky and water—calm and relaxing. Red is fire, hot, exciting and sexy. Green is natural and lucky. The eye can distinguish millions of different colors, so there are almost endless variations that you can work with to create your own unique look. It’s good to try different color schemes to best complement your brand and then stick with your final choice. Don’t keep changing—consumers need consistency to be able to recognize you.

When it comes to your advertising, makes sure that your company colors are present (to stay consistent with your brand) and then decide what other colors would work to convey your message. The example below for Terry Overacker Plumbing accomplishes this—their company colors are blue, cool gray and black—hinting at water and chrome fixtures. The ad itself has another bluish color echoing the water’s color of the photo and then the striking red is used to communicate the warning message of the ad.

I’ve worked with a lot of clients who want simple, bright colors just for the purpose of “trying to stand out”. If this is the sole reason for color choices, you’re just going to end up looking generic. If every single business used bright red, then we’d live in a monotone world. 

View the Twin Cities' own Metro Super Saver website - Direct Mail Specialists + Full Service Graphic Design & Advertising: www.metrosupersaveradvertising.com. 

Also visit our consumer-friendly coupon download site: www.metrosupersaver.com.

What to Name Your Beerfest

We have a client, Richfield Liquor Store, who asked us to design materials for a craft beer fest that he was organizing for one of his stores. He also wanted some suggestions on names.

I brainstormed some name ideas with our other designer: MN Craft Beer Cheer, Pitcher Perfect Beers, Super Suds of MN and so on... After a while, I thought why not just name it after his store? After all, this event is put on by him and it's a way of getting extra people into the door. That's when it became Richfield Liquor's Craft Beerfest. It's simple, it says what it is and it also says who is putting on this event.

Below are a couple poster options we designed for him. He went with the one on the left. 

View the Twin Cities' own Metro Super Saver website - Direct Mail Specialists + Full Service Graphic Design & Advertising: www.metrosupersaveradvertising.com. 

Also visit our consumer-friendly coupon download site: www.metrosupersaver.com.

5 Common Design Mistakes in Advertising

When creating an advertisement you should design it in a way to represent your business and make it stand out from your competitors. Your advertisement should be creative and unique, but still explain to the viewers what your business is all about. 

As a designer, these are the top 5 design mistakes I think you should avoid while creating an advertisement.

·         Including too much content – Don’t make it hard on your readers to find the information they are looking for; everything in a size 6 font is not a good thing. Let the reader know the most important topics about your business and create a hierarchy so the most important aspects are the first thing your viewer notices.

·         Providing only text/No image – Seeing is believing! It’s true a picture is worth a thousand words, save up some space in your ad by adding an image that will represent your business and make people want to know more! Also make sure it is a nice high quality image so it stands out (No one likes to look at darkm=, blurry images).

·         Not being consistent – Change is a good thing, however your ad should be recognizable. When you are consistent with the layout, font choices, color & the overall design, viewers will remember your business and will know what to look for!

·         Unclear content – When content is unclear, hard to read and doesn’t make sense as a whole, the viewer isn’t going to want to know more about your business. Make it simple and the message clear. In today’s busy world people don’t have time to uncover the hidden message, they want to be able to look at something and know exactly what they are getting into.

·         Hard to read type face – When picking a type face for your advertisement you want something that will stand out and make your advertisement unique. Pick something eye catching to draw the viewer in but don’t pick a type face that is difficult to read. Also limit your type faces in your advertisement. When you have too many type faces in an advertisement you are only making the advertisement look busier than it needs to be.

View the Twin Cities' own Metro Super Saver website - Direct Mail Specialists + Full Service Graphic Design & Advertising: www.metrosupersaveradvertising.com. Also visit our consumer-friendly coupon download site: www.metrosupersaver.com.

How to Advertise a Cemetery

One of our many successful clients is The Catholic Cemeteries of St. Paul and Minneapolis. They advertise with us every single month direct mail through the Metro Super Saver and also online through our coupon website www.metrosupersaver.com. If they can find success with our products, anyone can find success. It all just depends on how you advertise your company!

When you completely break it down, the cemetery advertises a specific need. That’s what all advertising should do. What need(s) are you selling to your customers? Figure out a way to show that to your audience.

Our cemetery client then allows that need to stand out by keeping things simple, clean and focused, as to not overwhelm or confuse the reader. The cemetery offers many different burial and cremation options, but rather than listing them all in every ad along with tiny pictures of each option, they focus on one per ad. This allows space for a nice, inviting photo, a headline that speaks to the prospective customers and enough space for a little bit of copy, an offer and the contact info. Adding anything else would just be unrelated clutter.

Are your ads too broad? Each viewer only gives a small amount of time to each ad, so you can be certain that they’re not going to read most of what you say anyway. Keep a clear focus on what you’re trying to sell and stick with that.

View the Twin Cities' own Metro Super Saver website - Direct Mail Specialists + Full Service Graphic Design & Advertising: www.metrosupersaveradvertising.com. Also visit our consumer-friendly coupon download site: www.metrosupersaver.com.

Advertising Hall of Fame January 2014

Super Saver Hall of Fame!

Here are a few of our favorite advertising designs from our Metro Super Saver direct mail marketing publications. They're clean, they're pretty and they share a message from our clients. Enjoy! We'll periodically share more.

View the Twin Cities' own Metro Super Saver website - Direct Mail Specialists + Full Service Graphic Design & Advertising: www.metrosupersaveradvertising.com Also visit our consumer-friendly coupon download site: www.metrosupersaver.com