GRAPHIC ART FOR ADVERTISING AND PROMOTION

General Information about Advertising and Promotional Artwork

Effective advertising and promotion relies heavily on knowing your target market and what that audience finds engaging. If you know that, then an artist can design to that audience for you. Otherwise, it's just guess work. That said, though, sometimes pure guess work can result in something going very big. The public is not entirely predictable in what it will or won't find appealing, so, sometimes, something completely "different" can work strong magic.

Vector Imaging versus Raster Imaging

Vector images use formulaic mathematics to create lines, curves, and shapes. Raster images use pixels. A lot of advertising art and promotional artwork produced for businesses requires it to be printed in large, medium, and small formats--large meaning up to billboard size. This means the work must be a vector graphic. A relatively crisp, simple image such as this, IMAGE, is relatively easy and inexpensive to create. However, an image that is very detailed will require extensive work, which means it will be extremely time-consuming to create.

A while back, a client referred someone to me who wanted a very detailed image set recreated from poor quality samples and hand sketches. My quote, while very reasonable, was rather upsetting to the gentleman because, though he wanted vector images that would reproduce up to billboard size, he didn't realize that it would cost him accordingly, in this case, $560 USD for one of them and $940 USD for the other. A word to the wise: The longer it takes, the more it's going to cost. Vector graphics cost more than rastered images when the image requires intense hours of work to produce.

Pricing

I used to work on the basis of the size of the image, a throw-back to the days of doing it all by hand with rulers, protractors, angles, french curves, rapido pens, wax, and razor knives. With the advent of computers, especially ones capable of handling large files, that's changed. I now base the work on both a flat rate charge and the number of hours needed to create the final image. Ultimately, this means it costs you a lot less. In fact, the better the software and hardware gets, the lower the price becomes because a lot of that gnarly work that required hours upon hours to complete has been taken over by good computers and great software tools.

Some Samples of Advertising and Promotional Work I've Done