Advertising Age
A news media publisher covering the advertising industry
for millions of marketing professionals.
Background
Advertising Age is a news and media publication owned by Crain Communications. For 80 years Ad Age
has covered advertising, marketing and media news for industry professionals, earning it countless awards and general
industry recognition as "the bible of advertising." I served as Ad Age's first Digital Design Director for 5 years during which time they
grew their Internet revenue by 300%. I designed and managed development of more than a dozen products developing and enforcing style guides to maintain consistent branding across Web and mobile platforms.
AdCritic.com Redesign
After the announcement of their acquisition of AdCritic.com (the most popular video site on the Web before YouTube), Ad Age recruited me to redesign the site to cater to professional users in the design and creative segment of the advertising industry. The new design needed to support a "freemium" business model combining subscription and advertising revenues. I worked closely with the editorial, marketing, sales, circulation and executive management teams of Crain Communications to introduce and manage a process for design and deployment. I began the process with my own research and design proposals. I questioned staff and users, documented my findings and produced wireframes to propose layout of content.
Fig 1: AdCritic redesign: wireframes
Visual design
I developed an HTML-based prototype for the team to experience page flow. After winning internal approval, I extracted elements from the Creativity Magazine logo and style guide (credit: Pentagram) to design the user interface. Creativity would be the new brand name. I extended sectional color-coding and fonts from the magazine to present video and interactive content unique to the Web.
Fig 2: AdCritic redesign: Creativity
Other Projects
During 5 years at Advertising Age I worked with department heads to design many other digital products, including:
- PayPoints™ — a micro-payment system for users to acquire articles and marketing intelligence
- Madison&Vine™ — a premium editorial brand covering the merger of content and commerce
- Reporting dashboard — tracking users activity across all Ad Age products
- Content Management System — a redesign of the editorial content management system
- Redesign of AdAge.com — a redesign of the primary Web site
Fig 3: AdAge.com redesign
Jason was a meteoric innovator of our Internet agenda.
—David Klein, VP, Editorial Director, Advertising Age
Credits
Director Digital Product Design
Jason Schmidt
Publisher
Jill Manee
Visual Design Consultant
Pentagram
Editorial Director
David Klein
Marketing Director
Elicia Greenberg