Marketing Campaign

[gritty solar]

for a newspaper company, they require a premium, trustworthy, and consistent visual style.

How can this design be improved? Is there anything wrong with it?

[hazy veldt]

Is the visual styling from them? Yellow and red are fight/flight colors and in combo often trigger a "guarded" state by people, esp as they have been heavily used by retail services. It's not quite authoritative or premium. Do you hae any "references" or sources of inspo that capture "premium, trustworthy" you can share? Just for more context

[gritty solar]

only the red

what can i use in place of yellow?

these are the shared references

the visual styling is up to me

This is the current in app banner

[hazy veldt]

i see how you got to where you were headed. is this a freelance project, trying to attract work, what other context is around this?

[gritty solar]

its part of a hiring assignment

i also need to create emailers in the same style

[hazy veldt]

🙄 these people who want work done for free

gross

[gritty solar]

i'm willing though coz i'm a beginner

only the task is not paid

[hazy veldt]

you do yourself credit, but the reality is, if they're going to use your idea as part of their paid platform, they should be paying you, regardless of how many times you've done it before

i digress

have you done any mood boarding or inspo searching for patterns that might support this?

[gritty solar]

nope coz its a month end offer

i couldnt link it to a theme

and the month of may isnt exciting either, no festivals

[hazy veldt]

true

but i more mean, things that fit the style of "premium," so on

[gritty solar]

nope but i have an idea of premium in my head

but im pretty sure they could compromise on the premium bit if they get more conversion

their examples dont look that premium

is there any way to test the conversion rate online and in a short time frame?

[hazy veldt]

not really, at least not in a cost effective way :/ you'll have to trust intuition

[gritty solar]

or do you know if any heatmaps could help

in my design i could tone down the yellow, but otherwise is it okay, like hierarchy and stuff

[hazy veldt]

my suggestions:
Avoid using too many alert or trigger colors (i.e., the extremely alert catching red and alert catching yellow in combination together). Opt for a softer yellow, like a pale yellow, or don't use yellow in general. You could use red UI elements on something, or you could go the other way around by being ultra bold, such as using a really red background and using white and black to create contrast that feels premium

You'll notice in that all the examples they sent you, they often have side elements that create a surrounding story that directs the users to the center of the ad, which is where the information is. So if you're going to do background UI elements, I would focus on instead of doing those circles that go behind everything, do them just so they touch the edges and keep the center space clean.

You might also be able to win by using something like the golden ratio to create the squint shape, and placing elements along that shape

[gritty solar]

squint shape? the spiral?

[hazy veldt]

It's a common accessibility rule to squint at something and see how much of it you can still understand. So you could use the golden ratio, aka the spiral that you mentioned, to create subtle direction and movement without having to call attention to it.

Things with this shape tend to be more visually appealing

[gritty solar]

do you have a visual example for this?

[hazy veldt]

You can see that in both of these they followed some rough sort of grid or suggested lines that roughly group it into thirds.

It's not perfect, but the general spirit of it is here.

[hazy veldt]

can i follow up 👀 i am curious what you ended up doing (even if you just went with the og)