A client once sent us a billboard design and asked for “the same thing, but for an Instagram story and a newspaper quarter page”. Reasonable request. The problem is that a billboard is wide and short, a story is tall and narrow, and a quarter page in a newspaper is roughly square and printed on cheap paper that soaks up ink. Same message, three completely different spaces.
If you just scale the artwork to fit, something always breaks. The headline becomes unreadable, the product shrinks to the size of a stamp, or the logo ends up crammed in a corner. So we don’t resize adverts. We adapt them, one size at a time.
Decide what has to survive
Before we touch any of the sizes, we agree on the parts of the advert that must appear in every version. Usually that’s:
- The main message, in as few words as possible
- The product or the key image
- The logo
- One clear way to respond: a phone number, a website, a shortcode
Everything else is optional. The secondary line, the list of features, the small print about terms and conditions. In the big formats it fits. In the small ones it often doesn’t, and that’s fine, as long as the four essentials are there.
Design the hardest size first
Most people start with the biggest, most impressive format. We usually start with the most difficult one, which tends to be the smallest or the most awkwardly shaped. A narrow web banner or a mobile story is a great test. If the idea works there, it’ll work anywhere. If it doesn’t, you’ve found out early, before you’ve built the whole campaign around a layout that can’t adapt.
Think about how each one is seen
A billboard on Mombasa Road gets maybe three seconds from a driver. A magazine advert can hold someone’s attention for much longer. A social post is competing with everything else in someone’s feed. These differences should change the design, not just the dimensions.
For outdoor, that means huge type, very few words and strong contrast. For print, you can afford a bit more detail, but check how the colours hold up on the actual paper. Newsprint in particular makes dark colours go muddy, so we often lighten things slightly for newspaper versions. For digital, make sure the advert still makes sense in the first second, before anyone reads anything.
Keep the family resemblance
All of this adapting has a risk: the versions drift apart until they look like different campaigns. The way to avoid that is to keep a few things fixed across every size. Same colours, same typeface, same photo or illustration, same tone in the headline. People should be able to see the billboard on their way to work and recognise the Instagram ad that evening as the same thing.
Plan for it in the brief
If you know you’ll need six sizes, say so at the start, and list them with exact dimensions if you can get them from the publisher or media owner. It’s far quicker to design a campaign with all the formats in mind than to stretch a single design afterwards. And it means you get a quote that reflects the real work, rather than a surprise later.
Our advert design page has some examples of campaigns we’ve adapted across formats. If you’ve got one coming up, send us the list of sizes and we’ll take it from there.
Header photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash.
