Simplicity + user interaction = the best banner ads. This HP ad I think proves it.
As a designer, you can so very easily reverse-engineer their thought process to figure out how they arrived at the concept, but that certainly doesn’t mean it was easy to do it the other direction. Often, the toughest part of any OLA brainstorm session is maintaining a level of creativity and spontaneity in your ideas, while allowing the message to speak clearly and loudly; the concept should convey the message, not obscure it. S & S have taken the physical limitations of banner size and made the medium part of the message, delivering the simple promise of large prints from a consumer printer.
Marshall McLuhan would be proud.
July 26th, 2006 at 2:19 pm
While this banner is indeed derivative of some print ads I’ve seen, in which a sentence is presented in a font so large it either does not fit entirely on the page or it is all crammed on the page and squished together, this execution still feels VERY fresh. I think that is due entirely to the user interaction part.