The Great Outdoors

Outdoor advertising, aka: billboards, aka: intrusive media.

Go just about anywhere and you'll be accosted by acres of cluttered, garbled and often illegible visual messages. Ah, it is a temptation, though! All that square footage! All that room to put so much … stuff! The problem is 1) in the context of the great outdoors, even the largest billboards are tiny and 2) unless you're perpetually stuck in traffic next to said billboard, there's precious little time to digest the message.

The solution, of course, is … simple. Keep it simple. Keep the images clean and readily discernible. Keep the copy to a minimum. Have a clear call to action.

If it's so easy to create an effective outdoor campaign why do we see so few?

In the credit-where-credit-is-due dept: the billboard design here is one of a campaign of five boards developed for Martin Communications. Yours truly creative directed the project and Greg Paone, a truly brilliant graphic artist pulled it all off, including conjuring ultra-clean icons to symbolize the various trade disciplines.