Creating and Designing Your Own Print Ads
Created | Updated Sep 2, 2003
There are many reasons why you would want to create your own advertisements. You'll be in control of the content. You can't always rely upon an agency or design department to get it right. You can maintain consistency between the different kinds of print media, because your ads will be done by you, instead of several different designers. And best of all, you'll have creative control over how your ad looks, all the time, every time.
With the wide availability of computers and design programs, it's now possible to be your own design agency. With attention to detail, you too can produce your own professional looking ads.
Getting Started
Publishing Programs
Whether you have a Macintosh or PC, you'll need a publishing program to put your advertisements together. Quark is the most powerful desktop publishing program available, and is available for both Macintosh and the PC. It retails at $899 (US) because it's meant for professionals, but it's worth the price. Its cheaper-priced competitor, InDesign by Adobe, is only $699 (US). What makes InDesign most attractive is its ability to export Adobe PDFs, which have become essential in the field of desktop publishing, because they work well across platforms. Aldus Pagemaker is the cheapest of the three, at only $499 (US). It's best used when creating brochures and newsletters. It's not a very powerful program, but for somebody that's just starting out, it's better than nothing at all.
It’s hard to judge whether you’ll need to invest in an art program. It depends upon how much actual design you want to do. Programs like Photoshop are intended to create a wide range of graphics, but like Quark, are priced for professionals. One useful aspect of Photoshop is its combination of vector paths and raster graphics, which allows users to create clipping paths. Illustrator, Corel Draw, Painter and others are excellent vector programs, and also do great text effects. If you feel comfortable with computers, invest in an art program to create the graphics that you need. If you’re not interested in being that creative, use one of the many excellent stock art websites available. They provide everything - photos, clip art, great backgrounds, and even ideas for your advertisement.
Choosing Your Media: Who, What, When, Where, Why?
Before you commit to advertising, ask yourself some specific questions. Advertising is an investment that doesn't always pay off, so be sure you spend your money wisely.
Why do you need advertising? This may seem like a simple question, but asking this of yourself will help you decide how you want to advertise. Instead of purchasing space in a newspaper, you might be better off hiring a teenager to stand in front of your store in a gorilla suit. It's important to decide if the expense of advertising will be worth the increase in business. And, conversely, if your business can handle the increase in sales. There's nothing more frustrating than a store full of customers and not enough product to satisfy their needs.
What are you selling? Who are your customers, and where do they live? If you want to expand your customer base, first ask yourself what you're selling, and who needs it. You've heard the old saying 'He could sell refrigerators to the Eskimos.' Obviously, Eskimos don't need refrigerators. Likewise, snow chains will not be a big seller in the desert. So it might be time for a little market research for your business. Find out what your customers want, and where they live. Then look for those types of people, (called a demographic) in your area. Perhaps they're scattered about, and an ad in a newspaper or magazine will reach them best. Perhaps they're in specific economic areas. Many newspapers and printers produce coupon books, handouts and flyers, which are sometimes inserted into the regular paper, and sometimes distributed door to door or in the mail. These can be tailored to the needs of the advertiser. Advertisers can reach customers specifically, rather than blanket the area and waste paper on people that will never need their services.
When do you need to advertise? If you have a high turnover in stock, or if you have specials that change everyday, this will make a difference in the choice of media. Some publications, like magazines, require the ad materials two weeks in advance. With newspapers, you can keep the advertisements more up-to-date, because their deadline for ad materials is usually two or three days before the publication date.
What do you want to say? Advertising is your message to the customer. It's a hook to get the customer into the store. Don't make the mistake of cramming everything you sell into the advertisement. You'll do yourself a disservice, and the space you spent good money on will be ignored because the eye naturally skims over small type. Keep your advertisement simple, big, and bold. Decide what your most popular product or service is, and feature it. Choose your advertising media well. With precise marketing, you can bring your message to your potential customers with a minimum of expense on your part.
Technical Terms
Printing has a language of its own. It’s developed over the years, from the invention of the very first printing press and movable type, to today’s high-speed computers and electronic output of film. Here are some brief descriptions of technical terms that you’ll need to know to work with the printing industry.
Raster and Vector Images These two terms are a complicated way to describe image file formats. Raster images use pixels. The more pixels per inch, the better the resolution. This is known as DPI, or dots per inch. This is actually the number of pixels used per inch in a raster graphic. A 1" sized graphic with 1 DPI would be a solid color - the color of the one pixel. Each pixel is colored a different shade - in grayscale, each pixel is a different shade of black. With color, each pixel is colored a certain percentage of a color range. Programs like Photoshop create raster images. Vector images use Beziér curves, points and lines. With enough of these curves, an almost photographic image can be created. Vector images have the advantage of being easily resizeable.
85 and 133 Line Screen Line screen refers to the way photographs were traditionally halftoned for print. Photographs are what the printing industry calls ‘continuous tone.’ This means that each color or shade in a photograph is a separate color. Printing presses can’t print a continuous tone photograph. If you look at a black and white picture in a magazine closely, you’ll see that it’s made up of tiny little dots. In a process color picture, these dots are cyan, yellow, magenta and black, while a black and white picture is composed of larger and smaller black dots. To create a screened photo in the past, an actual screen marked with 85 or 133 lines per inch was laid over the photograph, and a duplicate of the photograph was shot, creating a halftone. Today we use the computer, but the effect is the same. If a photo is to print at a certain line screen, the resolution of the photo should be double the line screen. 170 to 200 DPI is recommended for 85 line; for 133 line printing, 266 to 300 is best.
Process Color, RGB, and Grayscale Process color, or CMYK, is so named because it uses four inks - cyan, yellow, magenta, and black. These four inks in various combinations can produce any color. All graphics in a process color ad have to be either CMYK or black and white. RGB is best when used for web graphics, and when adjusting photographs to print in color. A grayscale picture is a black and white picture that uses many tones of black. Whether the picture looks black and white has nothing to do with whether it's grayscale or process. A process black has 100% black ink, and 0% C, M, and Y inks. Grayscale uses only black ink, in varying percentages for each pixel.
Spot Color This is a way for newspapers and other publications to give their advertisers color at a discounted rate. An advertiser can have as many as 2 spot colors in addition to the black ink, which will print on the page anyway. (Three spot colors and black ink would be four inks total - which is the equivalent of CMYK.) Spot colors are so named because the printer has to set up the page to print with color ink in that particular spot. This can be a great way to create a eye-catching visual at a cheap price. Check with your media to see if there's an option for spot colors, and what your choices are.
TIFF and EPS There are a few file formats that are designed specifically for the printing industry. A tiff (Tag Image File Format) file stores image data for grayscale and process color pictures. An EPS (Encapsulated Postscript File) incorporates vector graphics; an EPS might be a graphic outputted from a vector program, or it could be from a raster program and saved with a clipping path.
Clipping Paths, Duotones, and Bitmaps What do you do when you have a great picture of something, but the background is unacceptable? That’s when you use a little technique called a clipping path. These are also known as saveouts. In the early days of printing, this was a tedious process that took a couple of hours, * but today only takes a few minutes in Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop includes vector paths for the creation of saveouts. An artist can apply a clipping path around the graphic, save it as a Photoshop EPS, and achieve the same effect as an old-style graphic artist with a knife and an amberlith - except ten times faster. For those more advanced in Photoshop and other art program techniques, a duotone is a way of including two inks in an image. A spot color can be applied to a raster image, so that it separates in two plates - the spot color and the black plate. A process color ink can be applied to an image as well, but in most cases, it’s easier to work in process color. A bitmap is a black and white tiff that contains only black and white. A grayscale image contains many shades of black, while a bitmap only has one - pure black. Bitmaps are transparent, so they can be put on color backgrounds, and in Quark Xpress, can be printed in any color, whether spot or process. Bitmaps should be high resolution, preferably 1016 DPI to 2000 DPI. This may seem excessive, but because the art program doesn’t have to store information for the CMY plates, it ends up being a small file.
Graphic Design
Graphic design is a unique way of communication. It's more than just type and pictures assembled together. Graphic design presents information in a form that's easy to absorb. A good graphic design flows from one point to another, so that the eye naturally travels through the design. A good design doesn't have to be complicated, or in process color for it to be attention-getting. It shouldn't make the reader feel cramped, or uncomfortable - unless that's the designer's intention. All this is possible with the use of contrast, balance and space.
When you're creating your own ads, it's difficult to be objective about your design. If you've taken the time to write your own text, it's hard to cut some of it out, because you spent effort on it! The same goes for any graphics you've created. Remember to keep it simple, first. Make the most of your space, but don't crowd it. Your ad will be in the middle of a sea of words, so make it a hook that draws your potential customer's eye.
Elements
A typical advertisement consists of a headline, a graphic, body copy, the advertiser's logo, and contact information. Not all advertisements have to have all of these elements, but the advertiser's name and the contact information are essential. Now that you've decided what product you want to feature, and what media you want to advertise in, it's time to pull together your elements.
Headline The headline should bring all the elements in the ad together. It's especially important if you decide to go without a graphic, because then the headline becomes the draw for your advertisment. The best headlines are short and easy to understand - big enough to catch the eye and interesting enough to get the potential customer to read more.
Graphic This is the icing on the cake. A good graphic can say more about you than a headline can. It doesn't always have to illustrate what you're selling - it can tie in cleverly with the headline.
Body Copy How much body copy you include depends upon what you're selling. Customers like to be informed about expensive services, like roofing or surgical procedures. If your product is best sold as an impulse buy, keep the body copy short and sweet.
Contact Information One of the most consistent errors new designers make is forgetting to include the contact information in the advertisement. Ask yourself what your preferred method is of contact, and only put that information in the ad. You can confuse your customers with too much information.
Design
When you have all your elements together, it's time to arrange them into an attention-getting ad. Traditionally the headline goes at the top, but don't be bound by tradition - some of the best advertisements are unconventional. Proper use of your graphic elements can bring this ad together and make it a powerful selling tool.
Color This is a great way to convey a message without words. Warm colors tend to be 'hungry' colors; in other words, food looks better when placed next to a warm color. Blues tend to be 'clean' and relaxing. Soft greens make people think of plants, while pale green can be antiseptic in appearance. Bright yellow is the most attention-getting color, but it's also hard on the eyes. Red, yellow, and blue are your primary colors. For more interest, use your color opposites. To find a color opposite, look at a simple color wheel. If you don't have one available, imagine a circle, cut into thirds. One third is colored red, one yellow, and one blue. Take the color blue - its opposite two colors are red and yellow. Mix those two together to get orange; therefore the color opposite of blue is orange. For a shocking combination, try orange type on a blue background, or yellow on purple.
Balance The best way to illustrate balance is to take a sheet of paper, fold it in half, and make a large black circle on one half of the sheet of paper. Unfold it, and look at the paper. Your eye will be drawn toward the circle. If you put a circle on the other half of the paper, then your eye will be restless, switching back and forth between the two circles. If, instead of making two circles, you had placed a large circle in the exact center of the page, then your eye would be comfortable, and the page would be balanced. Elements in an advertisement require balance to flow from one to another. Imagine the elements as having weight. If there's a large object on one side of the page, place another large object on the other side of the page. Keep them from being symmetrical by staggering the items. Your eye naturally travels from one object to the next, making the ad flow. Overlap elements, such as the headline and the graphic. Establish an outside line in your ad that all the elements nudge up against, and align the elements internally with each other. This keeps the ad looking nice and neat.
White Space Allow white space to act as a balancer between bold elements, and keep your white space consistent. There should be the same amount of space between all objects. There are few things more powerful than one graphic element in a full-sized page of nothing; the negative space draws your eye toward the graphic. White space is your friend.
Fonts An aspiring graphic designer with a brand new font package may be tempted to use all of those cool fonts, all at once. This is a bad idea. Too many fonts will not only trash up your advertisement, it will cause printing problems. Most printers can't handle more than about fifty fonts in a single ad. It's best to use no more than two font families, and keep your styles different. In other words, if you're using a san serif typeface for your header, use a serif typeface for your body copy.* Font families refer to a single font, like Futura, that has several different weights ranging from 'Extra Bold' to 'Light.' These are available with the better Postscript font packages from Adobe, but aren't always included with True Type fonts.
The Final Stage - Is Your Ad Ready For Print?
You’ve spent a lot of time putting your advertisement together. You’ve made sure it looks just the way you want it. Now it’s time to get your ad ready for print.
Troubleshooting
If you aren't careful, a technical error can ruin a perfectly good advertisement. Some simple routines, such as using spellcheck, and always printing color separations, can save you quite a bit of stress. Make sure your graphics are at the right resolution and in the right formats, so that when they print, they won't appear muddy. Different media require different graphic formats. Be sure to check with your media of choice to find out what formats they need the files in before beginning. It's important when creating a print advertisement that all files are set to print at the proper resolution, otherwise the ad won't look the way you expect. One disadvantage of creating your own ads for the print media is that if the advertisement doesn’t run the way you wanted it, it won’t be their fault - it’ll be yours.
Checking Your Files
One common error beginning designers make is to save their art files at the wrong size and the wrong resolution. Always check to see that the graphics are being used at 100% of image size in your advertisement, and that they're set to print at the proper line screen. Graphics that are too high in resolution or too low can look muddy when they print, and if your art files are too large, it can cause printing problems. Make sure all raster graphics are in CMYK, or in grayscale. There are only two file formats acceptable in printing: the tiff file format and the EPS. Always get as much information as you can on file formats and printing resolution from your printer before releasing the advertisement.
Color, Contrast, and Oversaturation Color monitors are rarely color correct. Don’t rely on your eyes! If you want a specific color, you'll need to purchase a color book, or use the library of colors provided with your desktop publishing program. Many have Pantone and TruMatch libraries which install with the program. Unless you're experienced in treating color photographs, send them to a studio that specializes in preparing photographs for print. They will make sure that the photograph doesn't oversaturate the paper, and that it has enough contrast. If you're working in black and white, a studio is unnecessary. If the photograph looks good on the screen, chances are it will look fine when it prints. This isn't always true, and for a really nice magazine advertisement, it's worth your while to have the photograph worked by a studio.
Process and Spot Color When working your images in your art program, make sure that you save them as process, or CMYK. What this means is that the art program saves information for each plate to print. If the image is in RGB, then there will be no information on the CMY plates, and it will print in black and white. Spot color ads tend to be accident prone, especially if the designer has neglected to check the ad thoroughly. For example, let's say you have decided to run a spot color ad. You've chosen the colors green and black to use in your ad. The art that you've created in a vector program uses Pantone Green CVU. You build the ad in a graphic design program, and use Pantone 337 for the text. When the ad separates for printing, there will actually be three plates - Pantone Green CVU, Pantone 337, and the black plate. If the person running the press isn't watching, your ad will print and run with an element missing, because they'll only run two of the three plates. So be very careful, and always print separations to your home printer before releasing the ad to a printer.
Delivering Your Advertisement To The Media
There's several different ways to get your advertisement where it needs to go. If the final destination is in town, burning a CD or putting the ad on a portable disk, like a ZIP, is perfectly acceptable. Make sure that you include all files needed for print, and all the fonts that you've used in your advertisement. If you have no other alternative, and if your printer is capable of 1016 DPI output, then the easiest thing to do is print the ad and have it delivered. This is not recommended if you're running an ad in color. Even if your ad is in black and white, it's better to send the ad digitally - first-generation materials are always best.*
If you're concerned about your files getting to their destination safely, invest in Acrobat. Acrobat creates files called PDFs. A PDF (Portable Document Format) is a cross-platform file format created by Adobe. This is an excellent way of sending advertisements to the media of your choice. It embeds all graphics so that there's no need to send the images along, and when used with Quark Xpress and the Xtension Font Wizard, will even embed the fonts so that the fonts don't need to be sent either. With the file in a PDF format, there's no way to change it, which can be both good and bad. If there's a last minute change to the ad, it means that the artist department won't be able to fix it - it'll be your problem. It also means that the ad will be exactly as you sent it, eliminating any accidents with ad elements being moved.
Depending upon how many ads you intend to produce, it might be advisable to invest in a membership in AdSend. This is an online ad delivery service that will give you a preprint check to confirm that the ad will print as intended, and will notify you that the ad has arrived at its location safely. It will also send it to multiple locations. If your volume of advertising isn't quite that large, online FTP programs are a better idea. FTP sites are servers set up by printers, newspapers, and magazines to provide a service to their advertisers. With a username and password given you by the owner of the server, you can log on and upload your files to their site. Fetch is one of the better FTP server managers, but there are several other freeware programs available.
Great Advertising
You've gone through a difficult process to create your own ads. Picking out a media, selecting your graphic elements, putting your ad together, and troubleshooting any potential problems - it can seem very daunting. Remember that an ad doesn't have to look cool, modern, or retro to be successful. The best definition of great graphic design is an ad that works. Seeing your ad in print is very rewarding, but the real reward comes when you see your new customers walk in the store.
