Key Art and Fexible Art Guide

overview

Key Art is the primary artwork used in all the ads, posters etcetera for a thing. This could be as simple as a movie or video game or complex as an ad campaign for a product or service. The key word in this definition is "ALL." So what does all mean? For a simple campaign of digital marking using IAB digital banners, it would look like these units or some of these.

I hope by now you see your art need to be flexible. Flexibility does not need to be one piece of key art. you could have 2 or more pieces of art depending on where its going budget and what not. For this, we are going to focus on with just a little planning and thought about how you could get a bit more mileage out of one piece of art.

First things Layered art

Bad

• blank layers
• unlinked masks
• effect layers (that when you move elements below the effect does not translate.)

Good

• clean and clear labels for layers and groups
• simplified layers and groups (merge layers)
• well organized

Just doing this step help a lot when you give the art to another designer or another design team. Also, a little time to clean it up could save a lot of time later.

Extending the art

Making it, so the art has "extra" around the central focus help when creating a bunch of different sizes. This is a generic example to show off how this could be done/thought-about.

in this heat map example the red area is the most import part of the art. and the farther out you go, the less critical off the side.

Here is an example that could help illustrate what is going on in this art. NOTE* there was some shifting of the art to keep the focus on the monster head this template is to help guide art not be shackles. Also to inform you where you might run into problems. You might never have to make art that has an aspect ratio of 6x1 or 1x6. Finally, I recommend scaling and shift to get a strong image and use that as a guideline.

Conclusion

This is not a complete guide on how key art should or should not be made because at that point there will be too many subjective things. I just wanted to make some grand strokes that would make a lot of production arts and clients of key art very happy because they know or will have the confidence in the art they are getting. It also helps in showing off some example of how the art might look like is some executions.
NOTE* the guide PSD is not meant to make final art be a comp or example of how the art should look.