GiffGaff Instagram and Webpage Banners

This week, I've been planning the other requirements for the GiffGaff brief, which includes the Instagram and website banners. I designed the layout of four banners and two instagram stories.

I got my influences from adverts that can be found on the London Underground, which have to be eye-catching for commuters using this transport system, who may only glance at an advert for a couple of seconds. I also researched what the most common type of banner sizes were as GiffGaff didn't specify any dimensions. Roughly 40% of banners are 300x250 and 25% are 728x90, so I decided to use these dimensions. Instagram stories are all 1080x1920. 

First I made the banners as PNGs to get the idea for the layout.

Web Banners:

Instagram Stories:

Then I animated them somewhat like how they'll be animated for the final product. I did this using the Photoshop timeline, however I'll be using After Effects for the actual banners as Photoshop was very tricky to work with and kept deleting elements of previous frames when I was working on following frames.

What Went Well

• I believe the banners look professional and have a similar eye-catching characteristic to that of adverts found on the London Underground
• The banners all feature the requirements set by the brief (font, doodles, logo positioning, black and white noise bars, colour scheme)
• The gif versions of these adverts are very eye-catching, and the style for all of them will match the 20 second advert we're also making
• I found out what the most common banner sizes are in use

Criticism

• The white borders around the images got larger when the images were resized. This took a long time to recorrect, getting each border to the same size
• The PNGs don't show how the banners will look when animated, however I have a good idea of how each component will move
• The banners could be argued to be too safe, however I believe it's important that the adverts are as clear as possible, and of course, were they to be more busy, it would lose the overall message that GiffGaff are trying to get across
• Animating on Photoshop is very hard as elements of the work kept getting deleted of its own accord