Advertising by Design: Creating Visual Communications with Graphic Impact

Teaching advertising is an inspiring and challenging endeavor. Ideation, design, writing, and social responsibility are taught simultaneously. Students must become critical and creative thinkers very quickly, learning to design and write their creative ideas.
Without fail, every semester I want to hand over in a bundle all the information and insights into advertising that I possess, so that my students can immediately start creating ads with impact. I remind myself that it will take a few weeks for my students to get the notion that an idea propels an ad and that together design and copy visually communicate the idea.

At the same time as I’m teaching ideation, writing, and design, I’m hoping that research and discussion will expand my students’ views of the world. We talk about social responsibility and creating ads that, in both text and subtext, are respectful of people’s humanity. (Every effort was made to record as accurately as possible the dates, titles, and credits of historic works, given limited records from the period. Rather than list an inaccurate date, title, or credit for any work, some information has been intentionally omitted.)
The architecture of this book is transparent, like that of a good Web site, where some- one can enter at any point and know what’s going on. The suggested sequence most closely follows the logical order of teaching this subject: idea formulation, designing, media. When I teach, I first emphasize concept development, and during critiques I discuss both concept and design. Once students have grasped ideation, I focus on visual and verbal communication. By mid-semester, my students arc designing intelligent ads.
I emphasize:
Get attention.
Keep the viewers attention.
Be ethical.
Be relevant.
Serve as a call to action.

In order for my students’ work to be fresh, I always teach what my mother, Berry Linda, taught me about creativity: “Look at what everyone else is doing and do something different.” To push the freshness of my students’ designs further, I teach them what my father, Hy Linda, taught me about independence and personal style: “Do your own thing.” Use what is unique to you, and your work will reflect it.
In all my books on creative thinking, my parents’ wisdom has been emphasized. In essence, the message is: be yourself, appropriate, and fresh. Of course, in advertising, being yourself means tapping into your client’s brand s or cause’s distinct personality as well as your own uniqueness, and understanding what is relevant to your audience. My parents also taught me to be sympathetically conscious of others: and I teach my students to be socially

Book Details

• Title: Advertising by Design: Creating Visual Communications with Graphic Impact
• Author: Robin Landa
• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (June 9, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471428973
• ISBN-13: 978-0471428978
• Product Dimensions: 10.8 x 8.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds