Assignment 2: My Advertisement

For my advertisement, I decided to use a great deal of white space — anchoring the image and text to the right side of the flyer. I thought that the minimalism and contrast was most representative of the fashion editorial world and thus reflective of the work that I do — perfect for marketing myself as a fashion freelance writer! As far as colors, I opted for a more "high-end" color approach: gold, black, and white. Again, I felt that these colors best represented a fashion editorial feel. The text that I used, Bodoni, is one of the texts most often used for fashion magazine titles and logos. In fact, ELLE uses a modified Bodoni font, and I think that that typeface has come to be associated with quality, high-end product, which is something that I hope any viewers of this ad will then come to associate with my work.

I also tried to use an element of direction with the pen, prompting viewers to draw their eyes upward toward the top right-hand corner, where all of my contact info and career highlights are listed.

The pen is a stock images that I found on Google Images, but I cropped the watermarks off of it so that I could use. Then I drew my own "ink" squiggle going up to the text at the top, which took a lot longer than one might think in order to have the "ink" fade off in the way I was envisioning (and even then, I am not totally happy with it.) I used the real ELLE, FLARE, and Latina logos — those are images which I just essentially copied and pasted into Adobe and then cleaned up a little, as they had some of the magazine background around them. And the text, as I said before, is one of the classic fashion editorial fonts. I thought that by using the same all the way through, it gave the ad a more streamlined look.

Looking back on it, maybe I would have centered the image and made the ad perfectly symmetrical, but I kind of liked the idea of leaving the ad looking like the notepads that are often found in magazine offices with just the header of the name of the magazine and some sort of minimal design (if any) on the pad of paper. If in fact then this were to be a flyer, it would leave room for whomever to potentially take notes on the project they were hoping to have a freelancer complete.

This ad is one that I, theoretically, could use for my real life, as I have freelanced (and continue to write for) the titles listed on the flyer, but since editors/writers rarely market themselves or their services through flyers, it's more likely that I would incorporate this sort of design on a website background or header.