How to Design Display Ads for Digital Marketing

1. Introduction: Hello. My name is Jasmine and welcome to the design for digital marketing Course in this video series will be going over how to set up design and export what are known as display ads. Now you've more than likely seen these types of ads before. If I pull the website, you'll see that we have the content of the site here and then around this main content. We have these digital ads, and these were very from person to person. Digital marketers have gotten really good at finding and displaying the right kind of add to the exact type of person they're targeting. We won't get into exactly how that occurs. But as a designer, and especially if you work for an e commerce company, you might be asked to produce these kinds of ads. And it's an incredibly valuable skill set, tohave so in this lesson will go over how to design what it called static display ads and then, in a follow up series, will go over how to actually add animation and effects to the display ads like you see here . So let's begin 2. Lesson 1 - Setting Up Your File: now there are a number of ways and programs that you can use to design these display ads, but I personally have found that the easiest and most intuitive ways using Photoshopped Most designers are already pretty familiar with photo shop, so there's no learning curve there, which isn't always the case if you're trying to design using Google Web designer or with HTML five. So first things first will look at Google AdSense and get the specs for the supported add sizes. I'll put a link to this page in the course details description, but we can see here that there are a number of different sizes that Google will accept. We want to make sure that we have these top performers and some of the other sizes here to make sure that they could be marketed across many different platforms such as iPhones and tablets. So let's set up a photo shop document I have here completed suite of 12 different ad sizes , and I have them all within the same file. The reason I do it that ways because I like to have all the different ads visible at the same time so it could make sure they all look like they're part of the same campaign. I want to make sure that even though this ad is vertical and this one is horizontal and these air, square and rectangular, they all look pretty much the same, which I think is a little bit harder to dio when you have each add saved in a different document and you have to toggle between documents. So you set this up, we'll go to file new, and I'll set my ad size here, which in this case will be 300 by 600. I want to make sure it's a 72 d P I and an RGB color mode, and I also want to make sure that art boards is selected so it create. And now I have my first art board. I'm gonna go ahead and rename this 300 by 600 so that I don't get confused when I have all these different ad sizes in my art boards panel. Then I'll go to Layer New Art Board and set my next add size, which in this case is gonna be 1 20 by 600 and I want to rename it the same way I did the other 11 20 by 600. No hit. Okay, And there's my next dad size, and you can actually click on the edge of the airport and move these around to lay them out in any way that you that you want. So go ahead and repeat this process until you have all the different ad sizes that you need for your campaign. 3. Lesson 2 - Design Principles and Practices: Okay, So now hopefully you have a file that looks something like this where you have multiple different ad sizes and each has set into an individual art board, and from here you can begin to add graphic elements and design that add the way you normally would. I like to start with one of these rectangular add sizes because it gives me a good foundation to work from when I go through and then translate it into one of the vertical and horizontal abs. So go through here. So zoom in here and you can see they have this image layer and have a logo with an outer glow to give it some legibility. I have this shape that's kind of like a thought bubble. And then I have, uh, headlines in text, and I have this. But in here that's called a CT A or a call to action. Now, the truth is that once the ad is up on a website, the entire Addis clickable I can click anywhere on here, and it'll route the user to the correct page. But a strong and defined see ta helps draw the user's attention and makes it more likely that the actually click on the ad, so some common CTS will be signed up now. By now, we're like I have here learn more. But no matter what line you provided, you want to make sure that it's highlighted in some way. So go ahead and finish your first layout. And in the next lesson, I'll show you some easy ways to speed up and streamline the process of then creating all the other ad sizes using some built in photo shop packs. 4. Lesson 3 - Photoshop Hacks: right. So now we have one had completed, and we have to essentially redesigned this exact same. Add 12 more times and to speed up the process, I'm actually going to just duplicate all of these layers and copy them onto the next closest AB size. And to do this, I'm actually going to select all these layers and right quick and select duplicate layers you'll see in the window. When the window that pops up, I can select which art board to duplicate the layers on, too. Which is why is that? In the beginning, it's really helpful to name all of your art boards. It just makes it so much easier when you have to go through any kind of reference and duplicate onto, you know, all these different ad sizes. So select them in my next closest add size, which in this case is to 50 by 2 50 and I'll hit okay, and now all of the exact same graphic elements are in the same order and in the same layout as the one it just designed. And from here, all I have to do is make a few adjustments. Teoh this ad size, I'll have to resize some of the text often, maybe shrink some of these images, move your move things around a little bit, but overall, very easy adjustments. And even when I go on and duplicate these layers on to some of these horizontal and vertical sizes, I'm always using the exact same basic elements, which is really helpful and helps keep the the feel of each add consistent. Another shortcut is, let's say you finish laying out everything, and then the team decides that they actually want to change some of the text. In this case, let's say they want it to say Click here instead of learn more well, instead of going through an individual, individually clicking into an editing it each art board. I can actually go up to edit, find and replace text, and I'll tell Photoshopped to find every instance of, learn more and replace it with quick here that will make sure it's set to search all layers . And then it's not case sensitive. And then I'll say, change all and Photoshopped will actually would go through and find every instance of learn more and update it for me, and I could do that with any text layer I can actually tell it to. Fine, let's say for the in this example, fined 25,000 and update it to 30,000. Do the exact same thing changed. All photo shop will run that command. And now my tax has been updated again. Makes it really easy to make kind of global changes onto these display ads. Now, another time saving future is using smart objects instead of image layers. I didn't use it in this example because this layout kind of required some photo manipulation where I had to go in and actually add in some background on to these different ad sizes. But in this example, actually dropped in the image as a smart object. And then, like we discussed, I duplicated it onto each art board. So it's essentially the exact same smart object linked multiple, different times. And the benefit of doing that does. Let's say that I then have to change this image. For whatever reason, I can actually double click into this smart object and drop in a new replacement image. So I'm gonna go ahead and find my new image, drop it in and resize it to make sure it fits this art board. Once it's set, I'm gonna actually go ahead and flat in this image. So that's the same as it was before. Then I'll say that. And if I go back to my original document, I can see that photo shop is actually updated. All of them because they were all this at the exact same duplicated image. So all I have to do is go in and make a few finer minor adjustments, like resize them and make sure that they're correctly in the frame that I want them in, which again saves a lot of time when making you know adjustments are updating these these ads. 5. Lesson 4 - Exporting Your Display Ads: now, when it comes time to exporting these ads, it's fairly straightforward because these are static as there's no animation involved in this. So you can essentially just export a flat image file like a J Peg or a PNG. So we want to file export art boards to files and then from here all select where I want them to be exported. Teoh, in this case, I'm just going to save them to my desktop. We'll create a new folder where I want them to be in. Let us say aesthetic adds no create. And then right here, where it says file name prefix. That's just I'm gonna rename that to the campaign that I that's going to just I know which ones that they are in this case also states a generic brand head. And then I'll say, our board content only so that there's no overlapping areas and you can check. This really doesn't make a difference right here. We can see we have different options for exporting these files. We can't even export them as PSD is with layers. Should you need to share these with with anyone else but for our purposes, we just go export them as a JPEG. Then I'm gonna hit run. So it's going to go through and, uh, essentially flat in and export every art board as an individual J. Peg. And now when I go to my specified file location, you can see that it it assigned each individual j peg the prefix that I assigned it and also added the name of the art board, which again just highlights the importance of properly naming each are bored. Now. It's just a good habit to get into when you're managing so many different types of files. So there you go. Now you send the soft whoever's in charge of managing the campaign and Google AdWords and you're done, you can officially add digital marketing into your list of skill sets. If you want to take this even further and make even more engaging ads with animation and some effects, check out my follow of course, which will be a pretty soon where we'll actually dive into some more advanced features, Thinks and the book