To practice creating imagery and campaign cohesion, I worked up this draft set of materials for a potential Digging for Idols promotional campaign. As the primary focus point, I set up a small photography backdrop at home and dressed up my Yeti desktop microphone in one of our Digging for Idols buffs, Survivor-style. It seemed like a cute and eye-catching way of pairing together the essential building blocks of the show: podcasting and Survivor. I also took a photo in the same studio backdrop of a canvas print of the original Digging for Idols logo.
I say “original,” while it may look the same, because I also reconstructed the logo from scratch in Adobe Illustrator as a vector file. I did this by laying in the original raster logo that I had made when the show first started, at 3000×3000 pixels, into an illustrator then using shape tools to rebuilt it on top of the original, eventually stripping it away leaving only the new shapes. This included using Illustrator to adapt the torch and award statue files–originally open source clip art–into vector files on their own before importing them into the new vector logo. In the case of the torch, especially, this resulted in a massive array of layers to protect all of the shapes in the torch design while ensuring the new vector logo is fully scalable.
The tagline “Dig in.” is meant to be short call to action along the lines of a “Just do it” flavor. It both plays into the name of the podcast and also the frequent calls of Survivor host Jeff Probst to, “Dig!” Given the shows current niche footprint, it assumed whoever is being shown the ad is likely unfamiliar, and invites them to check out the season 1 catalog of podcast episodes.
Because the campaign materials include both horizontally and vertically-oriented aspect ratios, two different stock images of sandy beaches (selected after much, much searching) sourced from the license free stock image website Pexels were eventually chosen. The original version of each included elements stuck in the sand (Scrabble tiles in one, and small paper cutouts in the second), but I removed the items using the Clone tool in Photoshop to create fresh canvases on which to arrange the microphone, which I cut out from its background, and the new logo. Throughout the whole of the campaign draft images, from there it was mostly a matter of placing the mic in an attractive third of the image and arranging text in the cleanest areas of the image and choosing between white/black lettering for the boldest and most legible looks possible.
All text outside of the logo uses the free Survivant font, which mimics that of the show Survivor. That font can also be found in the Digging for Idols logo, along with a font designed to match the Hollywood sign. While it may be unconventional to mix two different fonts in a single logo, I feel the blending of the two worlds of Survivor and Hollywood–each baked into the soul and format of the podcast–justify bending the agreed upon rules of graphic design.
In addition to feedback sourced from these drafts, in a couple of places the edges of the mic can be smoothed over, and several designs call for blocks of text, currently in development.
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