Getting Two Links With One Ad Space

I’ve recently done some graphic design work in the form of a header for Caitlyn Imburgo’s blog redesign. As a token of her gratitude, she offered 160×200 pixels of real estate on her blog which I decided to use for advertising.

After working at Critical Mass for nearly two months now, I feel that I’ve been influenced by a great amount of creativity. Part of what we do at Critical Mass is online advertising for some of our clients — and some of the ads I’ve seen were not only interactive, but they also literally “thought outside the box”.

That was the preface to how I was influenced in creating this ad. Next, it started off with this illustration I made in Illustrator of a portfolio:

You might have seen this graphic on my portfolio
It also appears at the top right of this very blog

Unsatisfied with just creating an ad that was a single graphic to be hyperlinked, I wondered how I could become even more creative with this like some of the online campaigns I’ve seen. Fortunately, there wasn’t a huge process to that. I got the voila! moment while on the bus, commuting back home. While the idea was still fresh in my mind, I quickly made note of this in my notebook.

A blog is almost like a diary, and I had this idea that the portfolio graphic could be split in half. The bottom would stay the same, but the top-half would be of a notebook, represent my blog and link to it. What ended up happening was that I now got two links out of one ad:

The final ad

I’m really proud of the end result because it made good use of the space given. Also, it seems a little bit quirky that I hope you don’t just glance at it and move on, but instead give it a second look with that feeling of “…wait a second”.