My lunch hour.

My lady had been trying to come up with ideas for tourism advertising. I have no idea why but she kept going on and on about it and it got me thinking about how I would solve the problem of advertising to people who may have left Saskatchewan to go to greener or more mountainous pastures. It’s tough actually and the lady came up with some good ideas that I couldn’t possibly top (though there was one in particular that I’d love to tackle but she didn’t like the image I came up with. She was wrong on that one). Anyway, to me, tourism advertising is always the same. Most of it seems so stock, like you could go to someone like iStock, type in Tourism and buy a ready made tourism ad where all you had to do is fill in some text. Case in point, my lunch time design challenge—create an ad for the tourism industry to see how easy it is. It turns out it’s pretty easy. Go to Flickr, grab a couple of photos and make it up. Canoe? Check. Sunset? Check. Something in there to add some zest in your design? Check. Gradient? Check. It was actually pretty fun to try making something like this. It’s not really the kind of thing that you would normally sit down and say “I’d like to do some personal work, let’s see how little I can push myself.” In the end, I think I covered all clichés but in an hour what do you expect. I even had to fake the Home to beautiful type in the nameplate and remove some crap which I thought would be hard but was surprisingly easy. Thank you Photoshop Healing Brush. I love you. Home to beautiful would be my tag. Like Come Home To Beautiful which the body copy would better explain and I’d use it for different locations. I just dropped in some lorem ipsum. Oh and Tracy Island is where the Thunderbirds are from so don’t try to locate it on a map. Of course there are things I’d change but in an hour I think it’s pretty convincing. Click the image for the larger version and then criticize it in the comments.

EDIT: You know, I always get in trouble for this kind of thing. I don’t really understand why but I do. For instance, I made some kind of remark about a logo or something a few months back and I kept getting all these referrals from e-mails from the company I slagged. In this case, I mean no offence to anyone who produces these kinds of ads. I mean, they serve their purpose right? And obviously, if I were doing ads for a living, I’m sure I’d pump out a ton of this stuff. It should also be stated that the views expressed in this post are not the views of my special lady. As far as I can tell she has no feelings about them either way but you’d have to ask her. I don’t know why I have to explain these things, I assume that they’re understood but you never know. Consider this the disclaimer.

EDIT AGAIN: Hey whoever you are that seems to really like to hit this page, my portfolio is here, along with my e-mail where you’re welcome to send any comments, job offers or threats of litigation. Otherwise, you’re making me nervous. Thanks.