I designed this ad for a machinery company that sells European manufactured farm machineries to the Chinese market.
From a marketing perspective, the main objective for this advertisement was to appeal to the Chinese market by tying the product with the idea of European quality.
Thus the approach to this ad design was two fold:
The copy for product specs and features had already been translated by the marketing team, it was my job to work the text into the entire design.
For my work, there were several challenges I needed to overcome for this design:
For the Chinese text, I mainly used Microsoft Yahei because it is a sans serif font that features straight lines and slightly rounded angles, this gives the overall typography a modern look that works well with the theme.
For English lettering, due to its sparsity, I used Myriad Pro as a non seriffed font that worked well with MS Yahei.
I took a page from the old VW Beetle ads and chose this image as the ad's"center-fold". The featured product would take up most of the space to show off its prominence, shape, construction, as well as the honest, what-you-see-is-what-you-get design. While the product shape was odd and made for awkward text placements, I tried to leverage it to the design's advantage. The white background would also allow any colored text to show up nicely. However the end result was bland and the text failed to establish hierarchy.
Modern car advertisements have been extremely successful in communicating the idea of technology with quality, luxury, and comfort. I rethought my approach and decided to look for inspiration from pickup truck ads. I chose a picture provided by the manufacturer (not featured here due to legal restrictions) featuring the product digging in a quarry (final design background). The original picture had dramatic lighting and wide range of colors that didn't allow the machine to stand out and made it difficult for text placement.
To solve that problem, I went to Photoshop and selectively removed the background colors. To further enhance the product, I added in iris blur around the machine. I then took the edited photo back to Illustrator and added in the typography, using red bolded text to further emphasize and match the manufacturer's brand. These edits gave the overall picture a sense of ruggedness.
With the overall picture settled, placement for specifications and other texts automatically fell into place. I was able to establish hierarchy by putting basic product specifications on top, and pushing the finer texts to the lefthand side. As a final touch, I added in the orange stroke at the bottom left hand along with contact information as a part of the broker's brand.
