Traditional outdoor advertising represents one of the greatest creative challenges of all media formats. In contrast to other advertising, an Outdoor ad needs a big - yet simple - idea. The key thing to remember when writing copy is "less says more". As English copywriter, Tony Brignull once said of designing for outdoor: "How simple it is. Just one picture and no more (ideally) than five words. In that brief twinkling of an eye you have to arrest the attention, tickle the imagination, arouse the emotions and stimulate the desire".

Looking for a good outdoor option in Kolkata ? The Metro stations have some good branding options like backlit platform level show windows, pillars and wall panels. - We recently branded the Park Street Metro Station for Asian Paints.

Here are some tips to help you design a creative that really works for outdoors...

1. Wordiness. Remember your ad is only seen for a few seconds, so the message has to be unique, precise and hard-hitting.
2. A well established logo actually can take the place of a lot of copy.
3. Color-blindness. Color is very important in outdoor advertising and--no surprise here-bright works better than dull. Bright yellow is especially effective, as per international studies, in terms of being noticed and remembered.
4. Good outdoor is a marriage of large visual and minimal copy.

The critical values that need to be considered when designing for Outdoor include letter visibility, colour visibility and distance comprehension.

• Upper and lowercase type combined is easier to read than all capital letters.
• Too little spacing between letters makes them appear to merge together.
• At long distance, very heavy letters become blobs, and very thin letters become invisible.
• The colour combinations shown demonstrate readability at distance - with black on yellow being the most legible.
• Viewing posters from a distance helps appreciate size of type. Try the 6 metre hall test - take the artwork and place it in a hallway 6 metres from where you're standing and see if the type can be easily read.