Designing creatives with complex sale mechanics

Question

I'm Designing a set of creatives for sale campaigns (e.g. black Friday) for a fashion e-commerce. These would be in mostly landscape dimensions, but there are also smaller placements.

Compared usual campaigns with no discounts, where there's room to include imagery and persuasive copy, something we didn't anticipate was complex sale mechanics that could take up a lot of the space in creative.

e.g. up to 50% off + extra 10% off. besides this, there needs to be additional information like voucher code and T&C added to the creative.

1 good design solution I came across is this, tho here there is no room for an image and might not work for smaller landscape dimensions and other languages.

of course its possible to just use the sale mechanics as the only copy. with no persuasive copy.

anyone faced such design challenges that know workarounds or solutions to come up with a clean design while retaining the complex mechanics??

Answer 1

One strategy that you can use is sometimes called Messaging Management (Packaging Design Workbook, p. 87). It helps your audience to "chunk":

A way of dealing with or remembering information by separating it into small groups or chunks. -Cambridge Dictionary

• group like elements so that your audience feels like there is a lesser quantity of elements to make sense of
• use whitespace around families of elements to better define each grouping.

Above, we have 9 different visual elements (abstracted as circles, these could be logos, pictures, claims, discounts...). Disorganized (left) there seems to be way more to make sense of, vs. when they are properly managed (right).

You mention:

Though here there is no room for an image and it might not work for smaller landscape dimensions and other languages.

Have you considered something like this?

In terms of landscape format, I'm not sure how the website menus affect the space you have available but I am fairly sure you could use the same strategy of cropping 50%, especially that you repeat this number in a smaller point size so it doesn't matter so much if the numbers are difficult to identify; it still puts emphasis on the large rebate.