#43 Inspired by advertising

Pam reminded us this week that we can learn a lot from professional graphic designers who create advertising to entice us to purchase. They will have studied the principles of design and layout to achieve a visually pleasing result.

So, why invent the wheel, right?!?

I've done this exercise before and even though I thought I'd try to select my own advert to be inspired by, I decided to double challenge myself by using one of the two suggestions Pam had provided us. This isn't necessarily an advert I would have "noticed" but the blocking, the white contrast to the wonderful colours and the differing black font sizing seemed like things I could work with.

I started off trying to find something really bright and colourful to reflect those summer colours in the photo. This older BasicGrey paper jumped out at me and it's a line I've always found difficult to use so this seemed like the perfect opportunity. I selected two or three sheets with the brighter pinks and oranges and another with some turquoise tones. The last thing I needed was a sheet of white cardstock which I stole the middle from and a colourful photo that stood a chance against those bright papers. A panoramic photo from Dubai seemed to hit the mark.

I layered up different elements in a similar way to the original advert and finished that part off with the title work using three different sizes of font to match the advert. This was the part of the design which had particularly drawn me so it was interesting to see how that worked. The date is ever so slightly squashed up but on the whole, I like the line up of the three lines.

And then it needed a little something to be a bit more me so I wrapped several different twines round the middle picking up the aqua colour and some white, and then created a little flower cluster, adding in some older blingy elements and a couple of chipboard elements from the Marrakech line.

I think I will end up writing some journalling round the edge along the white border but for now, it's finished.

I can't say it's my favourite page and it's not even really "me" but I really enjoyed breaking down the elements of the advert to see what appealed to me and how to use it. I was really pleased to find a way to use this bright paper which I've struggled with in the past and now that I've cut into it for this layout, I can see me using a few scraps of it again. The wonderfully alluring colours of the original advert was just the summer feeling I needed today :-)

This is one of the things I love about our weekly challenges. They get me to try new things, to have a go at something that isn't really me, and pushes me to experiment a bit more than I would normally or can during something like LOAD. This layout has proved to me that I still love that layering, I can use the bright colours and that I should try different title work sometimes!

What have you learnt this week?

Don't forget to share over at Flickr in our gallery with the tag WM#43.