How to Create your AD

In a previous blog we discussed Designing your AD for Digital Publishing, Best Practices. Now lets look at how to create your ad.

Since this publication focuses on the arts, we will tailor the advice accordingly. As artists, gallery owners or a business or organization catering to the art community you want your ads to stand out and get your message out. There are a number of things to keep in mind when creating an ad for digital publishing as opposed to print.

We have the ability to hot link web addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers. With this in mind it is important to create an ad that contains real text and not just a image with text. For print advertising you could create your ad in Photoshop or Gimp and send in a JPG or TIFF or PNG file and it would work just fine. This will not be effective for digital publishing.

What do I do now?

To create and submit an ad for digital publishing you want to use a PDF file with a mix of images and text. The PDF format allows you to create an ad that will be hot linked to your website, phone number or email address and can be indexed by the search engines.

There is a wide variety of software that will allow you to design, create and export a PDF file, both paid and free. Applications include Adobe Illustrator, Adobe In-Design, Corel Draw, Quarkxpress, Ink-Spot or any other vector graphics program. 

You can also use an online design tool such as Canva, the free version works just fine.