Cross-Product Creative Challenge #13: Beauty Magazine Ad
Welcome to a new Cross-Product Creative Challenge! Thanks to everyone who participated in the movie poster challenge with such great creations. This time we’re switching from action movies to fashion.
(Note: This is not a prompt challenge. There are other challenges for that.)
The Challenge:
Design a high-fashion magazine ad for wealthy, non-alien animals—any creature will do, so long as it lives on Earth. Start in Firefly, Boards, Express, or Photoshop, but DO NOT stop at a prompt. There are quality details (lighting, contrast, composition) and content details you will have to get right.
Guidelines:
A prompt is not enough. Layer your assets and refine your composition. Treat Firefly and partner models as collaborators. Use prompts to generate assets you can put together in an ad. Think like an art director. What’s the story here? Who is the audience and what is the marketing message?
It’s a Cross-Product Challenge! Use Photoshop, Illustrator, Substance, Adobe Express, Fresco—whatever tools will help you build the scene.
Share your process:
Tell us how you created it. What tools did you use? How did you refine your idea? What choices did you make?
This one started life as an idea: What would it be like if camels had a beauty industry, fashion magazines, cosmetic brands? The starting point was to ask Nano Banana Pro, “Create a name and logo for a luxury hair and cosmetic brand for ultra-rich camels.” It came up with the brand name, a starting point for a logo, and some ideas for specific cosmetics. Mirabelle started as a Firefly 5 prompt: “A high-end magazine glamor photograph of an anthropomorphized young female camel with immaculately groomed hair and cosmetics, long eyelashes, in a luxurious beauty salon for camels.”
The ad copy and overall look are modeled on old cosmetic ads featuring different movie stars, particularly a Revlon mascara ad with Emma Stone.
Mirabelle went through several iterations to get the look, the hair, and (for this ad) the eyelashes right. The eyelash extender is one of several cosmetic items I made in collaboration with Nano Banana that will get their own ads.
In Photoshop, I made an image large enough for a magazine page at 300 ppi and generated an exotic “Arabian palace” spa for a background. “Select Subject” pulled Mirabelle out of her original image on Firefly Boards. Photoshop is also where the product image and the logo were refined.
Final assembly and layout is in InDesign, where the background image gets a color tint eyedroppered from the silk scarf, and the product is layered by using “Object Layer Options” on two instances of the product Photoshop file.
I’m encouraging everyone to approach this like you would a real client project. Composition, colors, copy, image quality should be appropriate for a high-end publication. Even if you don’t do this kind of work for a living, or very often, it’s great practice in getting the different tools to work together. Above all, have fun with it!
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