Tips on Creating Ads

I'm a professional graphic designer and here are several things I learned in the past about creating ads.

In this post, the ads I'm talking about is 125 x 125 px web ads in particular. When creating ads, you have to have several things in mind:

1. Will your buyer recognize the items in your ad? Like if they see it for the first time will they think of buying? "ooh, beads!" *click*

Any ad should be able to convince buyer in 2 seconds or they'll pass your store. Yes, 2 seconds, people.

2. Interesting colors. Interesting colors should help buyers noticing your ads.

3. Legible text. All text must be legible especially in that tight, tiny space. What's the use of using pretty fonts if they're not readable?

4. Less is more. In such tight space, simplicity is the way to go. make sure your pictures are clear, fonts are clear with minimal effect. Not too much text. Just enough to decribe your items/stores.

5. Show your best item, not all. Again, remember it's only 125 x 125 px. Maybe you have the most wonderful items in the world, but if you insisted on showing 50 items in 125 x125 space, let me tell you, it's not going to happen. Your items will be too small to anyone to even make out what they were. So showing off one or two best items in the way to go. Close up views are sometimes better.

6. Brighten your pictures. Dark pictures are less appealing than bright pictures. Even if your photos already in great lighting, sometime you still need to brighten them up a bit once shrunk to 125 x 125 px. This is totally optional.

These are example pictures of what i preached above:

The first picture is my old picture of my Toggle Clasp listing. It's dark, and not really shows the font well when shrunk to 125 x 125 px.

This pic below is my second one. I brightened it up, colors became more interesting, but the text is not too legible still.

Now this third picture is my current listing. it's a cropped version of the above picture, close up to the toggle clasp only, and I added yellow background for the text, and voila! In a single glance everything is clear and readable within 2 seconds.

I hope these little tips help! :D

Happy creating!