EOC Week 7: Exciting Ad

When working with visual advertisement, you have various design principles you have to conquer. You have to make sure you define a focal point, have correct balance, guide the human eye, harmonize the colors, etc. The above ad is successful because it utilizes basic design principles to make them all work together wonderfully.

The Nike ad defines its unity by their use of elements. The ad appears to be very grungy, dark, and poor. When the word “poor” is said, majority of people think of the ghetto or an overall community with low income. The media made African citizens look poor and dirty; mainly because of the commercials for adopting poor children, movies, images, the fact that Africa has the highest percentage of AIDS consumers, etc. Nike made a grungy, poor, emotional setting for the ad and unified a young African boy to go with it. The colors of the ad harmonize with the setting because red symbolizes pain while black symbolizes darkness. The unification of the colors, emotional setting, and the African boy work well together.

As well as unity, the ad shows great balance. Even though there’s a human and a dog on the left side of the image and text on the right side, the ad is still balanced. There are five elements within the ad that corresponds to each other to help balance the advertisement: the African boy, the dog, the Nike symbol, the Nike’s slogan, and the perspective of the shot. The way Nike worked the five elements are phenomenal. They utilize perspective to make the African boy and dog appear smaller than usual because it’s further from the camera. By the African boy and dog being smaller, they made the Nike symbol and slogan fairly big to balance the shot between the boy and the original empty space on the right side of the image. By doing so, it completes the perspective because anything closer to the camera is bigger than what is further from the camera.

Nike did a great job with their usage of visual hierarchy. The viewer doesn’t have to ask themselves various questions about the ad. Incorporating the slogan with the image was visually a master piece. They have an African boy urinating on the wall and not caring at all. The slogan “just do it” is pretty self explanatory. Nike is basically saying to not worry about anything, just do it.

Lastly, the composition of the ad is very well done. The African boy was the focal point of the shot but to take your eyes away from one side of the ad, the designer made the Nike sign red and fairly big. The color red stands out the most out of any color. Your eyes are automatically drawn the boy, then you see a red Nike symbol which shifts your eyes to the right, and the slogan is in black because black text on a light background (or vice versa) causes a pretty big contrast. Once your eyes drift from the boy to the Nike sign, then the next destination for your eyes will be the slogan. By utilizing the boy, symbol and the slogan, they displayed good composition and made the sell.