REI (Recreational Equipment, Inc.) is known for its outdoor supply and sporting gear. I am always drawn to their ads because they have an endearing feel to them. Most of their ads make me want to hop out of my seat and be outside in nature. When I was searching for an REI ad, it was actually hard to choose which one to analyze. I couldn’t find the original designer for this ad or where it was first published.
Original Ad Analysis
The original design is very simple, yet it has a lot of strong design aspects. The text and logo are aligned to the left and all line up as you can see with the strong pink line. This provides a nice visual along the left border. There is a strong contrast between the faded white text and the overall image as you can see within the pink circle. The proximity between all the texts and logo is evenly spaced, meaning it is all important and related.
The ad has one image over the whole area which I think is a great design choice. The colors are all natural of course because the image is a mountain biker outside. REI is a company based on outdoor activities so most of their ads are earth tones. The mountain biker is a nice complimentary color of oranges and yellows against the blues a you can see circled on the mountain biker with pink. The white text goes well with the natural colors, but also pops, especially against the mountains as you can see where I circled it with pink. If the text were a different color, it would clash with the natural colors in the overall ad.
The original ad has minimal text, even though it was made the focus of the ad, and then the REI logo. All the text seems to be the same font, so I underlined them both in pink. The small writing and large writing are the same color and font. In this instance, I don’t think this ad would have benefitted from two different types. The typography is a strong serif font that is bold, but not decorative. The serifs are pointed out by the green rectangles. It seems to also maybe be monospaced. I tried to point out the spacing using blue arrows.
New ad Analysis
I aligned my texts and logo differently. I wanted to keep my text white, but readable, so I put the large text aligned to the left at the bottom as you can see next to the bright green line. But I put the logo in another corner. This changed the proximity for my ad. It made the logo and motto seem less important and put them away from the main image. I wanted the main focus to be the large text and the background image, much like the original ad. The logo is a strong contrast against the pale blue sky which allows it to still be noticeable, which is pointed out by a green rectangle.
I used an image of a tent near the ocean as my overall image. This kept with the natural color theme. Both the original ad and the new ad have a color scheme of blue, green, white, and tiny bits of orange. I used the same white text against the image to be uniform with the original ad. Also, I think another color would be too bold for the text. The original ad made the text seem as if it was part of the natural image, so I tried to replicate that by keeping the white text against an image that contained some white in it already, which can be seen by the two green circles. I also circled the little pops or orange with pink.
For the new ad, I tried to match the font the best I could. My program did not have the exact match, but I tried to do a bold serif, just like the original. I circled the serifs with purple. While looking for this ad, I saw that there is a series of these, that are all alike. They kept the same typography style and REI logo to make all the ads coincide with one another. The fonts underlined in pink are the same, just like in the original ad. The typography is the main part of these ads. It is bold and obvious and in front of the main image.
Conclusion
These ads are very similar, enough that it is obvious they would be part of the same campaign. The beautiful outdoor images are what makes each one unique and eye-catching. I changed the layout enough of the second that it is obvious they aren’t meant to be exactly the same. The tag-line was created to suit the image I chose. The typography, logo, and design are what make the two ads related.
annaliesemits 
