How to create banner ads

What the ??? I thought there were a bunch of web gurus on this site. Hmmm...maybe it's not as easy to explain this as I thought.

Flash
Fireworks
Photoshop/Imageready

will all work for you. It really depends on what you are doing. I could be wrong but I think most of the banner ads that move are giffs as opposed to flash. If this is the case you would want to use fireworks or imageready.

Macromedia puts out good training books which would teach you how to do it.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0321213408/qid=1121963273/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/104-1922110-0903123?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

I've found that the more specific the question, the longer it takes to get answered (usually) but it does usually get answered.

Speaking as someone who's utterly clueless on this subject, found this with a Google search, may or may not be useful:

http://www.addesigner.com/

http://www.animationonline.com/

http://www.bannermakerpro.com/

I might be able to answer some basic questions if you have any specific ones.

Okay, thanks guys. I will check over the stuff you put up here so far and if I have any specific questions, I'll bring 'em later.

I also asked a friend of mine and I think he might be able to give me a live mini-tutorial, so I might be all set.

Thank you very much though.

take a long piece of paper

write on it

put it on your wall

TA-DA
Banner ad

I come from the technical side with no skills in marketing or art.

I think most banner ads are just "gif" files which link to the target webpage. Creating an animated gif is pretty easy with any of several graphics programs. I don't think the vast majority of snazzy banner ads are any more technically complex than your animated avatar.

I personally hate Flash banner ads, but again they are just files with links.

If you want to market web skill, I would suggest getting aptitude with photoshop, HTML and web building tools like Dreamweaver et al.

That's one way to go, I guess...

ebrown, I really don't want to get into the web stuff at all, I'm just thinking that it wouldn't be too hard to learn banner ads, and a person I talked to at an agency recently mentioned them specifically.

I am already pretty good with photoshop (although my current horrible job has been very good in killing a lot of the skill I once had). I just wanted to add a little bit of the web stuff just because it seems to be in high demand, and I think it would look good on the resume. I don't really want to get into it too much, but I think if I do go completely into freelancing again, and work gets scarce, it would probably be a good skill to have.

kicky, for the most part you do the same as you do for print, and just save at different quality for the web.

Most banners are jpegs or gifs. "Rich media" ads are usually flash, and it's sometimes used just for the animation but sometimes has scripting (for example, the ask jeeves banner has a bit of scripting so that you can launch a search right from the ad).

But there's really nothing to it, it's just a matter of making an image just like in print.

banner ads
Alchemy mindworks offers a free animation app that makes banners.

Geez, I lost track of this thead. Thanks for the info Craven, and opensource. I talked to a couple more people from the job placement agency, and it seems that they want some experience creating banners with Flash. My Flash guru buddy says he should be able to teach me that stuff pretty quickly. So I guess I'm all set.

But thanks again for the help.

Using photoshop, i put together this banner:

http://www.lunarsenate.com/banner%203.jpg

Photoshop is amazing for creating depth and a sense of perspective even in simple stuff like this, but if you're going to make an animated banner, I have to disagree with ebrown and say that Flash is a good way to go... but if you do so, make sure you export the Flash file as a .gif, else you'll have trouble finding a website that will allow a .swf banner.

Even if it's flashy, which it should be, overcomplicate it or jam it with too much info and it'll put off your viewer. Also, if it's animated, don't let it move too quickly, since except for the most savvy computer-users, they won't be able to keep up with the animation. Try to make it aesthetically pleasant while providing them with just enough information to attract your clientele. It's hard to juggle, and I daresay I haven't nearly gotten the hang of it, but it's certainly fun to try!

Best of luck, and if you need help with flash don't hesitate to ask.

Like Craven said, there isn't really much to it that's different from graphics for print if your banner isn't animated (or includes interactivity via Flash scripting or Javascript). And jpinMilwaukee noted the most common tools for the task (Flash, and Fireworks or Photoshop/Imageready).

For print, you generally want to preserve as much quality as possible, filesize be damned. For web, there's an emphasis on minimizing download times, so people try to get the filesizes as small as possible while maintaining a resonable level of screen quality (and nevermind making it look reasonable when printed).

One reason Flash ads are so common is because Flash offers more control, higher quality and smaller filesizes than animated GIF images in most cases. A knowledge of GIF optimization techniques can lop off a big chunk of filesize though....e.g. horizontally repeated pixels compress better than vertical, it's best to use a shared palette between all frames and limit the number of colors included in it (GIF only supports a max of 256 colors per frame anyway), avoid dithering if possible, only include the specific pixels that changed from the last in each frame, etc (there are of course tools to help you with all of these things). Even with these tricks though, I've always avoided the GIF format for all but very simplistic animation because of the often unacceptable filesizes that can be avoided with Flash vector-based graphics.

As for JPG format, it offers more quality and better filesizes than GIF for anything even in the ballpark of photo-realism, though images which use a limited palette may be significantly smaller as a correctly optimized GIF (and GIF will also offer better quality if you can keep yourself within its palette limitations as it is a lossless format).

One other thing to consider is that there are standard web banner ad sizes, and your designs will probably need to meet these. As such, it helps if a design is flexible enough to work in various size formats.