Print Ad/ Book Cover Design Assignment

After designing their logos and business cards, the children were ready to do their Print Ad. There is a LOT of design and execution that goes into making an ad, so I was just looking for them to demonstrate that they understood some of the concepts and design principles we talked about. They could either advertise a product, or redesign a book cover. Daisy was the only one that chose to do the book cover.

She worked really hard on it, choosing to use an old photo of herself for the goose girl, and clip art geese with clip art crowns. She learned how to paste and rotate and scale objects in photoshop, and to erase backgrounds. She chose the color of the cover, and the black shadow around the geese and the girl, to show that "this isn't just a kids' book, but it's a little bit scary and adults might like it too!" I love how it turned out! I might even like it better than the original. Note that this book is published by her company, "The Winding D."

I'm sorry to report that Sebastian and Malachi put off making their ads until they were nearly due, and as a result made them a little less polished than they could have. Both of them could have stood to do a few more concepts and rewrites. (Both of them could also do with a little less of the smart-alecky ad copy...but such is life with preteens! Ha ha.) Here is Seb's "Shmelf."

Some of Malachi's thumbnail sketches

And here are the last two version's of Malachi's "ad-making machine" advertisement. He thought his deliberate use of the Papyrus font was pretty darn funny in the left version. But after Sam's feedback, he ended up using the version on the right. "Lape" is his company name (I can't remember what it stands for...if anything).

Abe, my future businessman, LOVES doing this sort of thing and does it even in his free time. He came up with a music and movie subscription service catering to the "elite customer." He tried to suggest elegance and money-is-no-object in every line. He tried version after version, changing fonts and line spacing, experimenting with colors and layout. He worked really hard making it exactly as he wanted it! And the final product, printed out on glossy paper, really did look beautiful. Here it is:

Advertising and Marketing Unit Study and Lesson PLan

This unit was really fun. It included some media literacy and graphic design, and we also talked about symbolism in words and images.

The children had three main assignments as part of this unit: 

• Design a personal logo
• Design a business card or stationery using your logo
• Design and print out a print advertisement OR Redesign a favorite book cover

The design process was harder than the children anticipated (Sam kept sending them back to iterate again and again, and when they protested he just told them how many times HE has to iterate on professional designs before he's done!) but they really learned a LOT from doing these assignments. Even the simple task of figuring out how to adjust colors and settings to get a really nice glossy print was good for them. I'll show the finished assignments in another post (here and here).

Sam helped out a lot with the graphic design stuff, but we also learned a lot from the books The Non-Designer's Design Book and Go: A Kidd's Guide to Graphic Design. Those were my two favorite books from the unit.

We went on a field trip to Temple Square in Salt Lake City, and looked at the different symbols on the exterior of the Salt Lake Temple. (We talked about what the symbols meant the day before the field trip.) I used the symbols in this article, and printed out a little worksheet so the children could cross the symbols out as they found them. Everyone had fun with this, even the youngest children (with some help from me)! Here's the checklist we used:

A few more related links:

This vintage ad browser is kind of fun

The children loved this! You can make a font out of your handwriting. You have to make an account first, but then your first font is free. Here are some samples of our fonts:

(Here is the original "Marilynhand," if you're curious.)

We thought this was fun too, even though it's quite dated. A children's show talking about some of the "tricks" advertisers use to get you to buy their products.

A lesson plan for older children about persuasive techniques in advertising

We really liked these articles about color theory, brand identity and color in marketing: Part I and Part II

This show about gendered marketing was interesting. You might want to preview it first (if I remember right, there were a few slightly crude comments, but they went over the children's heads).

Some of these funny print ads were good

Monte Python's String Sketch is a classic example of how to sell something that seems useless :)

Brands, Profits, and Marketing

I found this "Snowman Soup" activity online and it seemed like a good way to talk about profits, brands, and marketing. The activity as written is great for older kids (it has some worksheets for figuring out gross and net profit, etc.); I modified it a bit for the younger ones and put more emphasis on the packaging too. Sam is always talking to his college students about the importance of having an audience in mind when you create anything, and this is no different. We tried to think about WHO we were trying to appeal to, and what kinds of messages we could convey with our logos, fonts, packaging, etc.

Along with this activity, we discussed the economics of company branding. It's an interesting thing to think about! As someone who grew up in a household that always emphasized what a waste of money it was to buy "brand-name" products, I was interested to read this several years ago in Basic Economics:

(page 504) Brand names are often thought to be just ways of being able to charge a higher price for the same product by persuading people through advertising that there is a quality difference, when in fact there is no such difference. In other words, some people consider brand names to be useless from the standpoint of the consumer's interests. 

In reality, brand names serve a number of purposes from the standpoint of the consumer. Brands are a way of economizing on scarce knowledge, and of forcing producers to compete in both quality and price… 

Brand names are not guarantees. But they do reduce the range of uncertainty. If a hotel sign says Hyatt Regency, chances are you will not have to worry about whether the bed sheets in your room were changed since the last person slept there. If the camera you buy is a Nikon, it is unlikely to jam up the first time you wind the film… 

Like everything else in the economy, brand names have both benefits and costs. A hotel with a Hyatt Regency sign out front is likely to charge you more for the same size and quality of room, and accompanying service, than you would pay in some comparable, locally-run, independent hotel if you knew where to look. Someone who regularly stops in this town on business trips might well find a locally-run hotel that is a better deal. But it is just as reasonable for you to look for a brand name when passing through for the first time as it is for the regular traveller to go where he knows he can get the same things for less. 

Since brand names are a substitute for specific knowledge, how valuable they are depends on how much knowledge you already have about the particular product or service…

Well, there's more, of course, and all of it good. But I can't reprint the whole book here! One more section, though, that provided a jumping-off place for our discussion about profits:

(pg 514) The performances of non-profit organizations shed light on the role of profit when it comes to efficiency. If those who conceive of profit as simply an unnecessary charge added on to the cost of production of good and services are correct, then non-profit organizations should be able to produce those goods and services at a lower cost and sell them at a lower price, [thus] taking away the customers of profit-seeking enterprises and increasingly replacing them in the economy. 

[However,] increasingly the opposite has happened: non-profit organizations have seen more and more of their own economic activities taken over by profit-seeking businesses… that can do the job cheaper or better or both.

And

(pg 523) Markets are often criticized for permitting or promoting greed. High prices are often blamed on greedy sellers. But "greed" is seldom defined. Virtually everyone would prefer to get a higher price for what he sells and pay a lower price for what he buys. Would you pay a dollar for a newspaper that was available for fifty cents? Or offer to work for half of what an employer was willing to pay you? 

Would adding a string of zeros to prices or salaries change the principle or the definition of greed? It is hard to see why it should… If it refers to people who desire far more money than most others would aspire to, then the history of most great American fortunes—Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, etc.—suggests that the way to amass vast amounts of wealth is to figure out some way to provide goods and services at lower prices, not higher prices. 

Back in the nineteenth century, Richard Sears was ferociously determined to overtake Montgomery Ward, the world's largest retailer at that time, and worked tirelessly for incredible hours toward that end, sometimes taking business risks that bordered on the reckless. Sears sought out every way of cutting costs, so that he could undercut Ward's prices, and every way of attracting customers away from his rivals. He did all this, not because he did not have enough money to live on, because he wanted more—and he wanted his company to be number one. If that is our definition of "greed," then he was greedy. More important, in this case as in many others, it was precisely such greed that led to lower prices. 

See here for more (and read the book for even more!).