A banner is an image commonly used to promote brands, identities, events, products, or websites. It can be a digital or a printing design. In this post, we focus only on the use of banner ads, i.e the graphic images across the top, bottom, or sides of a website or online media property.
Banner ads do drive business performance. Advertisers sometimes count the number of banner views, or the number of times a banner graphic image was downloaded over a period of time. So, yes, there's absolutely relevancy with the over 99% of digital ads that are not tied to conversion. That's all to say that clicks, video views, conversions, and other metrics should be strived for, whether they are proxies or direct sales.
If you are searching for how to design a banner that well delivers the messages of a brand or a campaign to users and customers, we've rounded up 5 simple yet practical tips for you to follow.
How to design a banner: 5 tips for beginners
Start with a clear purpose
How to design a banner effectively? First, start with well understanding of why you want to create those banners. What are the goals, the objectives you want to reach when creating your banner designs? In fact, there are various potential purposes when it comes to designing a banner, including the following ones:
Promote a brand or a campaign
Raise brand awareness
Highlight a new product
Create a sense of community in a place
Once you are well aware of the purpose, your design will become objective-driven. Also, it will help evaluate if your design achieves the goals set or not later. A great banner design doesn't come accidentally, it's created based on clear purposes and smart strategic plans.
After defining the purposes of designing a banner, the next four steps will be about choosing the right design elements and where to put your banner to make the most of it.
Use proper images
If you wonder how to design a banner effectively, images are among the most important design elements you should consider beforehand. Whether they’re photos, illustrations, or other graphic pieces of art, eye-catching visuals result in enhancing your banner’s design. The sizes and quality of images are also key factors to design a banner effectively. It's much easier to choose images to display on digital screens rather than to choose images for printing, especially wide-format ones.
To have clear and sharp images even when it’s enlarged, the right types of files with a high enough resolution should be used. There are two main file types to be aware of:
Vector (outlines): Vector images are line art graphics that will maintain their quality no matter how you resize them. Some common vector formats include SVG, EPS or AI.
Raster (bitmaps): Raster, or bitmap, images are comprised of tiny dots that form a picture. These images can only stand to be enlarged a certain amount before losing clarity. Some common vector formats include JPEG, JPG, PNG.
Creating high-quality images for your banner might cost an arm and a leg. You can find alternative and cheaper options via free stock photo websites or free illustration websites such as Shutterstock, Freepik, illustAC, Vecteezy, and so on.
Choose the right color palettes
When it comes to how to design a banner effectively, anyone working in design or marketing sectors should know that colors play an essential part in creating a good and well meaning-conveyed design.
To be able to choose the right color palettes for your banner depends on several factors, including what is the purpose of creating the banner, who is your target customer groups, what are their common perceptions towards colors. For example, in China, red represents happiness, beauty, vitality, good luck, success and good fortune. But in the US., it has been associated with sacrifice, danger, and courage.
Color palettes for digital banners are different from those for printing too. In other words, you don’t want a different tone or shade of colors when printing, make sure you use the right color profile.
Optimize texts
Beside images, texts used in your banner are important. To increase the impact of your banner, fonts, text hierarchy, word choices - they are all matter.
With limited space on digital screen, texts should be concise and of smart choice. With large sized banners, font and size are truly the key. Make sure your text is readable from the distance. People stop at a design for a really short time, in just a few seconds. If your banner contains a lot of words that are not right to the point, they leave immediately.
Regarding to text optimization, the three by five rule is a helpful guide for banner design. Keep text to a maximum of 15 words, which can appear roughly as three words times five lines or as five words times three lines.
Mind where your banner appears
The position to place your banner is the last but not least factor to consider if you consider how to design a banner effectively. Image quality, the color used, text fonts and sizes depends a lot on where you want to put your banner and what is the size of your banner.
Even for digital use or for print, readability is crucial. You don't want people have trouble reading the message on your banner for sure!
You might want to know best fonts for banners design or font size for banners
There it is, your very own how to design a banner effectively in 5 simple steps. You might want to try to create banners online too!
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