For this assignment, we were instructed to create a magazine advertisement for the Sawdust Art Festival located in Laguna Beach, CA.
Below is the ad that I designed:
For the design, I chose a gradient background with two colors from the website, a green and green-brown. I chose white text to continue with the theme on the Sawdust Art Festival website. By reversing their usual color scheme of mainly white with these two pigments being accents, it would allow the ad to pop if uploaded as a web-ad onto their website. When creating the advertisement, I wanted to make sure that it passed the "eye test." In other words, does the most important information pop-out at you first. For this piece, that information was the title of the festival, date, location, and website. I made sure they were in larger, bolded font to draw the audience's eye to the most important information first and make it contrast with the rest of the information.
I chose to make the visual element the outline of California with the Sawdust logo inside the state because I wanted a design element that not only could be reprinted and sold on t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc. at the Festival, but that could also be sold around the state in visitors centers and other souvenir shops to simultaneously increase the selling market and also spread word about the Sawdust Arts Festival. For this reason, I made it a central part of the ad and made sure that nothing was in close proximity to it.
The design appeals to the target audience because it's streamlined and laid out to direct the eye to the most important information first and then allows the reader to skim for more intimate details.