Beautiful & Creative Use of Typography in Print Ads

By Sonia Tracy in Artwork. Updated on July 28, 2022.

If you think making an impression through banners are hard in the Internet, we feel that printed ad shares the same fate. Therefore if your ads are not eye-catching and leave no impact, chances are they will be missed and prone to be forgotten in no time. Typography printed ads however is a great way to land within people’s interest and concentration.

Although it can be a successful marketing tool and with software like Photoshop at their fingertips, the possibility of things that they can come up with is pretty wild and limitless. Still, it may anytime backfire if they are not properly or precisely done, which makes it a challenging task. In today’s post, we are going to introduce some ways to achieve great Typography based print ads together with examples for your reference :)

Minimal Text, or a Wall of It

Unlike advertisements for television, people do not have to sit looking at the ad page but just skip past it to the article they want to read. The goals are to get the viewer to stop, view the ad, and remember the message. To do that, your text needs to get people’s attention right away.

There are three effective text formats in ads:

Say little and convey a lot. Clever ads show one word and then have another word written in the negative space created by the letters.
Say a lot of interesting things, or boring things, displayed in an interesting way. A wall of text won’t keep anyone’s interest unless it starts with a good written "hook" or the typography is appealing enough to make the viewer want to read to the end.
Don’t say anything in actual text. Instead, shape letters or words out of objects in a picture.

Different kinds of ads call for different amounts of text, but it’s surprising how versatile these three formats can be. A few examples of print typography campaigns:

Examples

Coppertone Sunblock: Kobe

S.O.S Campaign

Coca-Cola Light: Lemon Peel

Ikea

Pepsi: Joy

Penguin Books: Travel with words, Paris

Vodafone

Brighton Language School: Espanol

Toyota: Efficiency

Smarties Campaign

U.S. Preventive Medicine

Complot Creativity School – Typography Course: H

Bert & Bud’s Vintage Coffins: Mellow

Lots of Eye Candy

Print ads don’t have the motion and sound that television ads get to work with – they really need to make their space count. A striking image is great at catching viewers’ eyes, but since it’s an ad, it needs to have all the required text crammed into the composition, as well. Because of this, print ads often make images out of type or make words out of images. Flashy special effects are also good attention grabbers.

Examples

United Nations Population Fund: Population day

Orange SMS

Text messaging while driving prevents you from seeing what really matters.

Hahn Nitzsche Recording Studios: Kaffee

PS2: Girlfriend

Classic & New Recording Studios

Punny Messages

Visual puns are a great device for saying a lot with just one or two words. They are ideal for print ad requirements to say everything in one still image. Commonly, visual puns say part of a familiar phrase or proverb, then complete the pun with the materials and special effects.

Anatomy of a visual pun:

Take words such as "bad credit," "taxes," and "bills."
Take the shape of prison bars.
Combine the two by making the bars out of the words.
Add a subtitle, such as "Don’t be a prisoner to your finances."

Voila, a visual pun!

Examples

Mitchell Eye Centre: Trash

Mitchell Eye Centre: Diamond

Feltrinelli Publisher: Berlusconi’s bubble

Amazon: Rock

Being a Little Offbeat

With the number of ads that have already been made, originality is hard to come by. One solution is to make progressively weirder and more dramatic work. If an ad idea seems too weird, consider that the weirdness might make it memorable to others. Making a lasting impression is what every ad strives for.