Magazine Ad

While designing the Magazine Advertisement for the Sawdust Festival in Laguna Beach, I used the design techniques we learned during this lesson. For the main picture of the advertisement I used a painting of Laguna Beach at sunset. I used this image because it is of Laguna Beach, where the art festival takes place, and it is showing an art form by the picture being a painting. This image will appeal to beach and art lovers, who are the intended audience of this event. I used the eyedropper tool to pull out the colors from the beach picture in order to create a gradient background. I picked the color orange to brighten the ad.

I also used the gradient feather tool on the picture to create a smooth transition from the picture to the gradient fill with interesting colors that would be appealing to the audience. For the title of the art festival, “42nd Annual Sawdust Art Festival,” I used the pen tool and the type on a path tool in order to draw and type on a curvy line. By doing this, the title of the art festival stands out and attracts people to the advertisement itself.

I separated the dates and location of the festival from all other text to keep this information easy to find. For the other text I used simple fonts that are easy to read, but also appealing and match together. I did not want to use many different fonts because there would be too much distraction in the advertisement. I used the font tools such as, kerning, tracking, and the baseline shift, to improve the appearance of the text in the advertisement. I also centered the text describing the festival so people reading the advertisement would focus on this text first. For the text describing “You’ll also enjoy,” I bulleted the different activities using the polygon tool and gradient fill. This makes the text aesthetically pleasing and easy to read. I chose the star shape in order to made it look a little like a paint dollop.