Design Principles in Advertisements (I.)

This series analyzes the design principles often used in advertisements and discuss how these principles are used to attract attention, influence the opinion or convince the potential consumer for purchase.

We are living in consumer society where people are constantly buying different kinds of goods. We are spending our hardly earned money on commodities we need for satisfying our basic biological needs – such as food, clothes and place where to stay – or as we call it ‘home’. But in our ‘advanced’ society often happens that after satisfying these basic needs we still have some extra money to spend. And this is the place where advertising comes into play.

Usually, we are spending this extra money on things that will make our life easier and more enjoyable. But what are these things? Is it the new iPhone 5 with the bigger display? Oh, I am sorry – “It’s not just bigger. It’s just right.” Or maybe it is Galaxy S4 that “brings everyone closer together” and “simplifies everyday tasks”.

What are the tricks that make advertisements so appealing and persuasive? This series summarizes several basic guidelines that when combined create message with strong influence.

“Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need.”  

– Will Rogers –

80/20 Rule

It is worth mentioning that classical Pareto principle can be applied to advertising. It says that 80% of the people are influenced by the 20% percent of the adver-tisements. This numbers can slightly vary in the reality but the main idea still holds. The most people are influenced by very small amount of the advertisements. This may be caused by the huge amount of advertisement that is all around us. We have developed some kind of filter and we simply ignore advertisements that are not enough appealing.

Layout guidelines in advertising

Rule of thirds

One of the basic techniques how to create esthetically appealing advertisement is the rule of thirds. The objects of the primary focus are placed on the grid dividing the image into horizontal or vertical thirds. This principle has roots in history, when great painters used this grid as baseline for composition of paintings.  In the examples below the horizon line is aligned approximately to the one third of vertical size of image and the elements of primary focus are placed in one third of horizontal size.

Golden ratio

How to select the appropriate size of the elements on the picture? The golden ratio gives us the answer. It says the ratio within the elements should approximate value 0.618. You can see this rule applied to the size of primary focus elements in advertisements above and it just looks right.

Guttenberg diagram

Gutenberg diagram describes the flow of the elements in the image. When we look at the advertisement we tend to scan its content in a specific way – from top left corner through center and down to right corner. The area where we start, primary focus area, is used for communicating the advertisement message – comparison of a car to jet in this case. After we read the message we continue scanning the image where we see the beautiful car and we finish our image scan in the corner where the company name and logo are placed.  In general, this layout creates very strong message that gets deep into our heads. And that is exactly what advertising does.