Anatomy of a Banner Ad: From paper to screen

I’m hoping to release some posts over the next week or two discussing some of my experiences building banners with Adobe Flash and to give a general overview of the process from concept to delivery.

This overview is based on my experiences as a freelance Interactive Designer in various advertising agencies and therefore the process is geared towards creating a banner for a paying client. Naturally the design process can vary from agency to agency so I will try to keep this fairly generic but highlight potential pitfalls along the way.

Concepting
The concept stage of a banner design happens once a brief has been received. Usually the brief is written internally, agency side, after an agency representative has met with the client. The brief should cover the client’s requirements and outline the overall conversion the banner should provide. A list of publishers (sites which will host the ad) and the required banner dimensions should be included with the brief.

The concepting and design phase is possibly the most critical of the entire process. Concepts should be kept relatively simple and convey a ‘general idea’ of how the banner will work. Hand drawn sketches, scanned and touched up is enough. Colour should be used sparingly if at all.

The dimensions, as supplied in the brief, should be kept at the front of your mind while going through this process. Occasionally the design will need to work across a range of different dimensions from 300×250, 728×90 and 120×600.

Design Flats
Once a concept has been approved by the client a more refined round of design begins. The idea of this stage is to build upon the approved concept and turn in into a completed design of what the final banner should look like. I say ‘should look like’ as there is often certain limitations, mainly file size related, which can effect the final finished banner.

This design should cover off all the key points of the brief and be presented back to the client. It is important that this design is considered ‘feature complete’ by the client and it should be made very clear to them that once they sign off on the design they are agreeing not add any new requirements.

It is important to note there is client/agency politics that occurs behind the scenes that designers aren’t necessarily made aware of. This is not always a bad thing as a lot of it is irrelevant to a creative’s job. Agencies have an inherent duty to their clients to ‘keep them happy’ so it is important that the people who are communicating with the client are also communicating with the creatives working on a project. This is imperative to avoid scope creep by agency representatives promising clients changes outside of the initial brief.

In my next post I will discuss the process of turning an approved design into a working banner.