Deja Vu?

With production well under way for Mission Maker, besides designing the entire publication, we occasionally do a few of the ads as well. The above is a "Round 2" proof for Economy Travel. Before starting work on the ad, I had a phone conversation with our contact at Economy Travel (Bill) and he had wanted his ad "to stand out". Which of course everybody does but in talking with him further, I got the impression I could be a little more bold in my design than I normally could.

I found a series of pictures with countries overlapping a boys face. Very cool and very bold. I knew it would stand out. So I purchased the image from a stock photography site (istockphoto.com) and added the Bible verse and the text that was given me. Now the downside to using royalty free stock photography, is that any one else can use it. So if you want to be original and not worry about seeing that same picture somewhere else, royalty free stock photos is not the way to go. The big upside to RFSP is it is considerably cheaper.

Anyway, I submitted the proof to Bill for his approval. He liked the layout and had a few text changes. Excellent! Thinks are moving along. The only thing I'm waiting for is a high resolution logo.

To keep our sales director Arika in the loop, I let her know the process is almost complete. She comes over to my cube to take a look at the ad and says "Oh! I've seen this before."

HUH!?!

She tells me to go to Bethany College of Missions home page (whom we are on the campus of) and guess what image I see.


NOOOO!!!

Turns out Bethany had been in the process of redeveloping their website (again) and it had just gone live this weekend. Little did I know they were using a picture from the same series of photos that I had just chosen.

Thankfully Bethany's Mission Maker ad is not using that picture so we are safe. And since it is stock photography (open for anyone to use) and Economy Travel isn't basing their entire look off of that picture, we are ok.

But it still sucks the wind out of you after designing something and see almost the same photo being used so close to home. Oh well. Such is the life of a designer.

(On a side note, for those of you who submit text for ads, do you notice how much better an ad looks with minimal copy? The website is so clean compared to the ad I did with all the copy on it. Good job Bethany!)

—b