Carol Timke and family has hired Diamond D Graphics (again) to design their color full page horse ad for the 2012 Iowa Paint Horse Club Directory. Carol wanted to focus the ad on one of their paint show horses they had to put down this past year ,”Freckles”. The horse ad also needed to show the rest of their paint show horses and 2011 accomplishments. I had the challenge to layout this ad with several horses, focusing on one and include the show results text. That’s a lot of graphic elements in one ad and is hard to layout without looking busy and hard to read. As a designer, I have to layout the graphic elements in a way to show each horse in an easy to view design and find a way to put the main focus on the first horse in the ad.
For the background design of this horse ad, I chose Carol’s animal print show shirt as the graphic element. I personally liked the design of the shirt and thought the colors would compliment the horse colors and make for a cool looking background. I took that shirt, sized it to fit the ad dimensions and worked my magic.
Scanning Photos for Ad Design
The pictures Carol sent for the ad were pictures she had scanned herself and emailed to me. When you hire Diamond D Graphics to create an ad design, one of the professional services you are getting is my knowledge of editing images you send me for an ad (or website). In these photos I edited the levels of light, color corrected the photos (too much red in them), sharpened them, and performed other corrections for their best output in the printing process. The scanned pictures had small white dust specks on them, which were not visible to Carol with her scanning equipment. When I pulled the scanned photos with my professional software, I could see the dust. I have no way of correcting that scanned image from dust particles. The photos needed to be scanned again with special attention to blowing the dust off the photos and the scanner; OR taking a digital photograph of the photograph that can be emailed to me. I’m mentioning this to help inform and educate my customers on duplicating photos for ad design. Make sure your photos and scanner are clear of dust. Those small particles of dust are not visible with the naked eye, so try to blow the dust off too.
Thanks for reading,
Susan Davis
