For many years now, I’ve noticed that when I look at an advertisement, be it in a magazine, a newspaper, or on a billboard, I often ignore the communication and am more inclined to critique it. Is the imagery suitable and well done? Is the copy pithy or funny enough? Is the layout busy or uncluttered?

Even when an ad works, in that I look at it, read it and get hooked by it, I still find myself saying, “niiice,” at the end of it, rather than thinking about the company, brand or offer being sold.

I tend to wonder who created the work, rather than allow any benefit to be given to the advertiser — “The XYZ ad was really nice. EFG did a really good job with it”.

How about you? Are we all ignoring the message in others work and being critics? Can we be sold to, since we know (or assume) that the advertiser had little to do with the ads we see?

Note to the nine people who read this blog: I’m smack in the middle of developing some work for a pitch, and have been pretty tied up with work. Because of this, I’m going to be a bit irregular about posting here.

I think these ads are a powerful use of national flags, given that they’re normally a symbol of pride. That’s been turned on its head here. Stunning stuff.

I came across eight of them and they’re all equally good.

Some information about the work, pasted from here.

Grande Reportagem is a Portuguese news magazine that is recognised for its investigative reports and excellent photo-journalism. In 2004 the magazine switched from being an independent monthly publication to a weekly supplement in the Saturday edition of the daily national newspaper Diário de Notícias, owned by the same publishing company.The creative challenge of the campaign was to reaffirm the magazine’s unchanged commitment to serious journalism by focusing on topics that are important for people’s understanding of the world today.

This led the creative team to the concept “Meet the world” and to the idea of using flags of different nations as vehicles to transmit it. In each case, the colours that appear on various national flags were used to symbolise a social or political issue that is specific to the country in question.

I came across these three print ads for Companhia Athletica at Ads of the World a few days ago. I thought they were great and especially liked how the third ad shows the man trying to block the inflow of soda. You’ll have to go to AOTW to see the larger versions of each ad (You really should — they’re that nice.)

Technorati Tags: companhia athletica, print ads, art direction, design

There’s a phenomenal set of images on Flickr representing Swiss graphic design history. I haven’t been able to go through all of them yet, so can’t state which is my favourite.

It’d be nice though, if anyone went from here to there, to post back what they were drawn most to.

Technorati Tags: swiss, history, poster, graphic, design, typography