Design Great Print Ads: Print Advertising Strategies

It's the same challenge everywhere: if you're advertising somewhere, chances are good that someone else is advertising there, too. Who will get the prospect? The business that gets the prospect is the business whose ad resonates most clearly with the prospect's needs at the time. But how do you get your ad to resonate with their needs?

Design.

An ad's design is meant to catch their eye and draw them in. In some cases, you don't have a lot of design options: pay per click ads and classified ads are two examples. But many, many other print ads - from business cards to yellow pages to brochures to newspaper ads - all require an element of design to attract the reader's attention and get the message across.

Here are some solidly performing design ideas to help you create your own print-based ads:

Contrarian: Look at the medium and do the opposite. For example, in a newspaper that is heavy on text, consider taking out a large ad and using all black (or all white) with minimal text. This method is used very successfully but still has some opportunities available. And the bigger your ad, the more effective it will be. (Imagine a full page newspaper ad with a single word in the middle, followed by your company's website that's a great ad!)

Unusual: If everyone in your industry is giving out regular sized business cards, consider an extra large or extra small business card. Sure they can't carry it around in their wallet but maybe they'll leave your novelty sized card on their desk or in a desk drawer; they'll remember you as "the guy with the giant business cards".

Good design: Quite often, do it yourselfers rely on their own design skills to put together brochures, business cards, etc. The result is an appearance of mishmashed ideas, as if the designer wanted to use a different font or font size for every line. When designing your own print ads, follow these basic design principles to help you:

• Stick with just two fonts: a sans serif font (like Arial) for headlines and a serif font (like Times New Roman) for the text that gets read. Sans serif fonts are clean and look modern but they are actually very hard to read. Serif fonts have those tiny little "serifs" on the edges of the letters and that reduces eyestrain among readers and makes the words easier to read.
• Pick 3 font sizes. Your heading text should be twice as large as your normal text and your subheading text should be halfway between. For example, in a brochure, a great font size set includes 24 point headings, 18 point subheadings, and 12 point text. (Of course these sizes might change if you are doing some other kind of print ad, like a business card.
• Don't spend all of your money on 4 color printing. You'll save money and arguably end up with a better looking ad if you choose a 2 color printing. If your brochure, for example, is all in various shades of blue and there are splashes of orange throughout, it can help stand out much better than a brochure that has every color imaginable.
• Be sure to keep plenty of white space. Cramming in as much information as possible makes the ad look cluttered and difficult to read. A few powerful words and a way to reach you might be enough.