Spoof Final - Bialek

Melissa Bialek

Maybelline  Spoof Ads – Makebelieve “Maybe it’s Beautiful/Maybe it’s Surgery” Print

05.01.2013

Double Print Ad:

 

In Print:

Magazine it would appear in:

Alt Setting:

Old School Maybelline ad (for reference) :

After much struggle, I completed my ads. Instead of using Adobe Illustrator due to my lack of proficiency with the program, I opted to purely use Adobe Photoshop CS6 with the help of my drawing tablet. I made the ads to be meant to be displayed back to back in a magazine, or a few pages apart – preferably right next to each other. The other option would be to prop them up on a bus stop advertisement.

My original idea was to spoof the current style of advertisement Maybelline puts out, where they take headshots of beautiful women and simply have their sans-serif logo and tagline in the corner. However, though a student gleefully pointed out I could find the font for the logo online, that font cost $55. I wasn’t about to drop that much money for a font I’d use just once, so I looked up older advertisements that Maybelline put out, found a matching font to their old style, and decided to make a mock-up.

            I re-named the company “Makebelieve” after the suggestion of a saint in class, and just ran with what I felt looked right. I personally prefer the blooded face half of the advertisement to the smiling one, but perhaps that’s because there’s more text. The most tedious part of the assignment was honestly trying to figure out where to position text and how to fill the space… along with finding the right fonts to use. Because Maybelline’s choice for logos, old school and new school, is simply a font, it was a matter of finding the right font to actually get that done. Thankfully, daFont.com came to the rescue.

            The other issue was pictures… I don’t like taking pictures, I don’t want pictures of me on the internet, and I didn’t like the red tape stopping me from using stock photos. So, why not add to the old-timey feel and make it abstract illustrations instead? I was inspired also by prints my mom keeps around the house from old Chinese advertisements.

            Maybelline is a very famous company across the world, but most of its pull seems to be in the USA. They commonly find fresh-faced models that could be a girl next door, similar to Covergirl, and offer affordable cosmetics you can find at a drugstore. However, it’s not hard to figure out that much of the beauty of their advertisements is created by image manipulation programs, and possibly even plastic surgery the models had before being shot and dolled up in Photoshop. This is what my campaign pokes at – that it’s not truly the makeup that makes these models (or you) beautiful, but the necessity of plastic surgery to become a gorgeous girl.

            I feel like this advertisement pair doesn’t have quite a “professional” feel, but I feel that it can still get the (rather obvious) message across. I’m relatively satisfied with how this turned out.