I am teaching Desktop Publishing in fall 2020 at Lamar University. It is effectively a design class that covers all media. The students are required to build a portfolio of their assigned projects upon which they will be graded. I decided that I should do all the assignments myself to serve as examples. Of course, I am not going to claim they are all great, or that I necessarily spent the amount of time I expect the students to spend on the projects, but that is the privilege of rank.
Assignment 3: Advertising (part 1)
The first advertising assignment was to take an existing company and, using only type and a logo, create an ad. I chose Pandora, the music streaming company. I used part of Duke Orsino’s quote from William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”: If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it. I chose Baskerville, a transitional Roman font, for the quote in an attempt to give it a classical feel. As a fan of punk, I listen to a lot of playlists that are best played loud. I used the display font Edo for the main type as to suggest screaming over loud noise. The juxtaposition between the classical quiet font and the loud display font is both eye-catching and, I hope, amusing.
Assignment 3: Advertising (part 2)
The second advertising assignment was to take the made-up company logo from the earlier assignment and create an ad incorporating images and text. I returned to the Shellfish seafood restaurant logo and found an image of a fresh shellfish platter which I superimposed on a photo of the sea and the shore at 60 percent opacity. I came up with a pun on selfish/shellfish to create a humorous slogan. The “no one said you have to share” is amusing in relation to the large platter. I used the display font Phosphate, which only has capital letters, because it references the striped deckchairs, right, found on the beach front. I also created a slogan for the restaurant, “Ride the wave of flavor!” which I may keep for future projects.
English with a bit of Texas 