Over the years I’ve designed a ton of in-house print and digital advertisements as well as ads for outside advertisers. I’ve also cobbled together/duct taped third-party ads that were submitted at the last minute and contained a multitude of problems (stop me if you’ve heard that one before!) so that they would manage to actually print correctly.

This particular ad is one my favorites. The drywall mud covered hand gripping a smart phone is our contractor members (aka our readers) in a nutshell. I worked some magic (recreated from scratch) our magazine’s digital edition interface in order to combine the image with the phone without a loss of quality as well as some transparency trickery for a bit of reflection. Throw in some simple icons with just the right amount of copy and you have all the ingredients for a solid ad.