Class Practice: Advert on Pixlr

This week in class we looked at and discussed adverts, focusing on images, layout, taglines, branding and how to use these to make a clever and effective advert. For our in class practice we received the theme 'fashion', I have chosen to advertise womenswear aimed at younger women who enjoy travelling. 

I used Pixabay, Unsplash and Pexels to look for the images that I wanted to use and chose the following:

What I liked about this image was the contrast in colours, the red against the dark green background. It makes the woman and the dress stand out and there is a lot of space to put a tagline and a logo. While the dress stands out and it would be clear that the advert would be about clothing, it is unclear that the woman is travelling specifically as there is nothing to indicate that she has travelled to the forest that she is in.

I found this photo more suitable for my advert, it is clear that the woman is travelling because of the suitcase she is carrying and she is making her way through a field to reach whatever her destination might be. The dress has a busy pattern, caught in the sunlight and flowing in the wind, pulling the focus in towards the dress. The background is mostly blurred out, which allows for space to put a logo and a tagline. 

I opened Pixlr and created a canvas by clicking the 'Create New' button, then I chose an A3 sized canvas and added a white background. After my canvas was created I turned the canvas to landscape mode by clicking 'Image' in the top menu and chose 'Canvas rotation', then I chose to rotate the canvas 90 degrees.

I then clicked on 'File' in the top menu, chose 'Open Image' and selected the image that I wanted to use for my advert. I selected the layer of the image and clicked 'Edit' in the top menu to Copy the layer, then I went back to my canvas and pasted the image in by clicking 'Edit' and then 'Paste', creating a new layer for the image. Using the cropping tool in the left menu, I cropped the canvas to fit my image.

I went onto the website FreeLogoDesign and filled in my brand name; Travelling Dress, and clicked 'Get Started'. From the menu on the left I chose the category 'Fashion and Beauty', which gave me a selection of logo templates to choose from. When I decided on a template, I clicked it to open the editor. In the editor I changed the background to white by clicking the colour under 'Background Colour', on the right hand side. In the 'Items' menu I selected 'text' to change the text colours to green.

I added the logo to Pixlr using the same process as explained earlier in this post and pasted the logo onto my canvas using the copy paste process as explained previously. I adjusted the size and placement of my logo using the 'Arrange' tool in the menu on the left. I then cut out the 'Your Tagline Here' text in the logo using the 'Select' tool on the left.

I then clicked the 'Text' tool on the left and created a text box in which I typed my tagline. In the text menu that appeared on top I changed the font to 'Aiden' and then I used the 'Fill' option at the top to change the text colour to green. I then adjusted the size of the text to 225 using the 'Size' option in the same menu. After this I adjusted the placement of my tagline using the 'Arrange' tool. 

Above is my final result. I clicked on 'File' and 'Export' in the top menu to export my imagine as PNG to save it to my device and upload it here.

I personally enjoyed the process of making this practice advert, it was simple and straightforward and it introduced me to even more free software that I can use online. I think the image came out well for the time it was finished in, the atmosphere is exactly what I was going for; very relaxed and gentle with the focus on travelling and the dress. I tried to create the logo using similar aspects, the text and the artwork are simple and easy to understand and the tagline and model confirm that the advert is for a fashion brand aimed at women that want to look good while travelling around. For next time I hope to spend more time and thought into the advert, experiment with more images and to come up with a better tagline as I think this one is a bit too easy to come up with and has very likely been used many times before.