100 Ways to Create a Great Ad…

… and a 100 Ideas That Changed the Web

Two new books landed on our doorstep the other day: 100 Ways to Create a Great Ad and 100 Ideas that Changed the Web. As their names suggest, they act as introductions as well as excellent reference books for creatives involved in these areas.

As we all know, a great ad – well in print format anyway – is basically the marriage of clever copywriting with strong visuals. Here author, Tim Collins, himself a copywriter with a career in advertising, identifies a hundred approaches as a way of exploring the creative process. We learn about concepts such as ‘reveal’ or ‘mash-up’ – with each of the 100 spreads dedicated to one of these approaches.

100 Ways celebrates advertising as an art form. Collins breaks down the process of creating an ad into three steps: planning, concept creation and crafting so that the book provides a straightforward guide to concept creation.

In 100 Ideas that Changed the Web, author Jim Boulton, looks at the history of the web from its early roots in the research projects of the US government, to the interactive online world of today.

We learn of the web’s key technologies, such as hypertext and mark-up language, of the social ideas that underlie its networks, such as open source and creative commons, and key moments in its development, mainly broadband and the dotcom crash. The author also touches on social networking and the latest developments such as the cloud and the semantic web.

Boulton is the curator of Digital Archaeology, an event that celebrates the golden age of the website. What he’s created here is an interesting piece of design history that maps out the relatively short, yet profound history of something that has entirely transformed our lives.

100 Ways to Create a Great Ad and 100 Ideas that Changed the Web are published by Laurence King.

Design Talks is published by Spinach Design