ADV 210 Notes, Fall 2010

316 Chapter 14 Design and Production WEB REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. What are the responsibilities of an art director? The person most responsible for creating visual impact is the art director. The art director is in charge of the visual look of the message and how it communicates mood, product qualities, and psychological appeals. The art director makes decisions about whether to use art or photography in print—film or animation in television— and what type of artistic style to use. 2. This chapter says that photos and illustrations have different roles. Explain how they are typically used and the effects they are designed to create. When art directors use the word art, they usually mean photographs and illustrations, each of which serves different purposes in ads. Photography has an authenticity that makes it powerful. Most people feel that pictures don’t lie. For credibility, photography is a good medium. A photograph is more realistic and an illustration is more fanciful. Illustrations eliminate many of the details in a photograph, which can make it easier to understand because what remains are the “highlights” of the image that we use most often in recognizing what it represents. This ease of perception can simplify the visual message but it can also focus attention on key details of the image. It can also intensify meanings and moods, making illustrations ideal for fantasy. The decision to use a photograph or an illustration is usually determined by the advertising strategy and its need for realism or fanciful images. 3. Compare the use of black and white, spot color, and full color in terms of visual impact? Color is used to attract attention, provide realism, establish moods, and build brand identity. Print ads with color get more attention than ads without color. Some ads use either full color, which helps convey realism; black and white, which lends dignity and sophistication to a visual; or spot color, in which a second color is used in addition to black. Spot color is highly attention-getting, particularly in newspaper ads. Color can help convey a mood. Chapter 14: Design and Production 317 4. Explain the aesthetic role of typography. Find an ad that illustrates how type can add meaning to the message. The ad’s typography is the appearance of the ad’s printed matter. In most cases, good typesetting does not call attention to itself because its primary role is functional. Type, however, also has an aesthetic role and the type selection can contribute to the impact and mood of the message. 5. Define and explain the following terms: • Uppercase, lowercase, U&lc: Uppercase refers to the use of a capital letter, lowercase means small letters used without capitals, and U&lc is a design in which the first letter of every word is capitalized and the others are lowercase. • Justified, unjustified: With justified type, the ends align on both the right and left sides of the column of type; with unjustified type, the line endings on either the right or left side of the column fall where they fall. • Weight, posture, width of type: Weight, posture, and width of type can vary, using such elements as light, bold (weight), italic (posture), expanded, and condensed (width). 6. How big is a pica (relative to inches)? A point? There are 72 points in an inch. The pica is a bigger unit of measurement with 6 picas in an inch and 12 points in a pica. 7. Explain legibility and describe four type practices that create legibility problems. The legibility of type refers to how easy it is to perceive the letters. Reverse type is hard to read because people are accustomed to reading type as black or dark shapes on a white or light background. All capitals and surprinting, which means running the type over another image, are also more difficult to read. Another practice that harms legibility is printing letters vertically, one on top of another. 8. Describe the six stages in the process of creating a layout. • Thumbnail sketches • Rough layout • Semicomps • Comprehensives Part 4: Effective Advertising Messages 318 • Mechanicals • High-resolution film 9. What are the differences between newspapers and magazines in terms of their design and production requirements? Different media put different demands on the design, as well as the production, of advertising. Newspapers are printed at high speed on an inexpensive, rough-surfaced, spongy paper called newsprint that quickly absorbs ink on contact. Newsprint is not a great surface for reproducing fine details, especially color photographs and delicate typefaces. Most newspapers offer color to advertisers, but because of the limitations of the printing process, the color may not be perfectly in register (aligned exactly with the image). Magazines have traditionally led the way in graphic improvements because their paper is better than newsprint. Excellent photographic and color reproduction is the big difference between newspapers and magazines. Magazine advertisements are also turning to more creative, attention-getting devices such as pop-up visuals, scent strips, and computer chips that play melodies when the pages are opened. 10. What are at least five things to remember about designing a directory ad? An outdoor board? Directory ad: • Size: The larger the ad, the more consumers notice it. • Image: Graphics signal the reputation or image of the store. If possible, the headline, the illustration, the layout, and the use of type all should communicate the store’s personality. A beauty shop ad will look different from an ad for auto parts. • Simplicity: Keep the number of design elements to a minimum. • Art: Illustrations work better than photographs. • Map: If using a map, keep it simple to make the location clear. • The business: Use graphics to convey the product category. Spell out the scope of service or product lines in the body copy. • Convenience cues: Give prominence to location and hours because people look for stores that are open and easy to reach. • Critical information: In addition to location and hours, the phone number must be included. Chapter 14: Design and Production 319 Outdoor board: • Graphics: Make the illustration an eye stopper. • Size: Images in billboards are huge—a 25-foot-long pencil or a 43-foot pointing finger. The product or the brand label can be hundreds of times larger than life. • Colors: Use bold, bright colors. The greatest impact is created by maximum contrast between two colors, such as dark colors against white or yellow. • Figure/ground: Make the relationship between foreground and background as obvious as possible. A picture of a soft drink against a jungle background is hard to perceive when viewed from a moving vehicle at a distance. The background should never compete with the subject. • Typography: Use simple, clean, uncluttered type that is easy to read at a distance by an audience in motion. The industry’s legibility research recommends avoiding all-capital letters, fanciful ornamental letters, and script and cursive fonts. • Product identification: Focus attention on the product by reproducing the label or package at a huge size. • Extensions: Extend the frame of the billboard to expand the scale and break away from the limits of the long rectangle. • Shape: For visual impact, create the illusion of three-dimensional effects by playing with horizons, vanishing lines, and dimensional boxes. Inflatables create a better 3-D effect than most billboards can, even with superior graphics. Made of a heavyweight, stitched nylon, inflatables can be freestanding, or they can be added to outdoor boards as an extension. • Motion: Add motors to boards to make pieces and parts move. Disk-like wheels and glittery things that flicker in the wind create the appearance of motion, color change, and images that squeeze, wave, or pour. Use revolving panels, called kinetic boards, for messages that change. 11. What is a screen and how is it used in the reproduction of a photo? Photographs, which are referred to as continuous tone or halftone, are complicated to reproduce because they have a range of gray tones between the black and white. Printers create the illusion of shades of gray by converting continuous-tone art and photos to halftones by shooting the original photograph through a fine screen. The screened image is converted to a pattern of dots that gives the illusion of shades of gray. The quality of the image depends on how fine the screen is. A coarse screen is used by newspapers while magazines use fine screens. Part 4: Effective Advertising Messages 320 12. What does the phrase color separation mean and how does that work? The process printers use to reduce the original color image to four halftone negatives is called color separation. In photographing the original, a separate color filter screens out everything but the desired hue for each of the four process colors. 13. Explain five types of printing used in advertising production and give an example of the type of advertising materials printed by each method. • Letterpress: A process used for numbering items (such as tickets and so on) and specialty printing effects (such as embossing). With letterpress printing, a raised surface gets inked; then, when it strikes the surface of the paper, the image is transferred. • Offset lithography: The most popular type of printing for newspapers and most magazines. Offset lithography uses a smooth-surface and chemically treated plate to transfer the image. Based on the principle that oil and water don’t mix, the oil-based ink adheres to parts of the image but not to other parts. The offset plates are produced photographically. • Rotogravure: A process used for long print runs with high-quality photographic reproduction. Rotogravure printing uses an incised surface. The images are engraved into the plate and ink collects in these little wells. When the plate strikes the surface of the paper, ink is transferred from the wells to the paper. • Flexography: A procedure that prints on unusual surfaces and shapes, such as mugs and balls. Flexography uses a rubber-surface printing plate that can be bent to print on irregular surfaces. The plate transfers ink similar to offset printing. • Silkscreen: A type of printing used to print posters, T-shirts, and point-of-sale materials. Silkscreen printing uses a porous screen of silk, nylon, or stainless steel mounted on a frame. A stencil image is made either by hand or using a photographic process and the stencil is adhered to the screen. The nonprinting areas are blocked by the stencil and the areas to be printed are left open. Using a squeegee, ink is forced through the screen onto the printing surface. 14. Explain the following video terms: • Stock footage: Previously recorded images—either video, still slides, or moving film. • Crawl: Computer-generated letters that appear to be moving across the bottom of the screen. • Morphing: One object gradually changes into another. • Animation: The technique of animation traditionally meant drawing images on film and then recording the images one frame at a time. The introduction of Chapter 14: Design and Production 321 computers has accelerated the process and eliminated a lot of the tedious hand work. • Stop motion: A technique used to film inanimate objects like the Pillsbury Doughboy, which is a puppet. The little character is moved a bit at a time and filmed frame by frame. • Claymation: Involves creating characters from clay and then photographing them one frame at a time. 15. What’s the difference in the roles of producers, directors, and video editors? The producer oversees the production on behalf of the agency and client and is responsible for the budget, among other things. The director, who is the person responsible for the filming of the commercial, is usually someone from outside the agency. This person takes the art director’s storyboard and makes it come to life on film. The editor puts everything together toward the end of the filming or taping processes and evaluates how to assemble scenes and which audio elements work best with the dialogue and footage. 16. Distinguish between the terms used to describe motion: zoom, dolly, pan, and truck. • Zoom: Zoom in or out means the lens on the camera manipulates the change in distance. As you zoom in, the image seems to come closer and get larger; as you zoom out, it seems to move farther away and get smaller. • Dolly: The camera itself is wheeled forward or backward. • Pan: The camera is stationary but swings to follow the action, • Truck: The camera itself moves right or left with the action. 17. Explain a shot transition. What’s the difference between a cut, dissolve, superimposition, and wipe? • Cut: An abrupt, instantaneous change from one shot to another. • Dissolve: A soft transition in which one image fades to black while another image fades in. • Superimposition: Two images held in the middle of a dissolve so they are both on-screen at the same time. • Wipe: One image crawls across the screen and replaces another.