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Constantinos Demetriadis

IAB Banners

During the UX Magazine presentation at the Greek Design Panorama 2005 , right after I wrapped up my speech, I was asked a question from the audience which more or less was the following:

“This site, as you told us, has been built on an 8x grid, each column being 120 pixels in width, how do you see any IAB standard banners fitting into your design. Doesn’t the prospect of advertising concern you?”

I came to a quick response: “We’re not interested in money, so banners do not concern us”.

We’re not interested in money

I’d like to apologize to the inquirer publicly because my answer was just half true. I mean, we’re not doing this for money, if we were then this site would have been flooded with banners. The part that’s untrue is that banners don’t concern us. In fact I believe we’ve headed down the right alley when we decided upon the 8x grid and 120 pixel width columns.

IAB Standard Banners on our Grid

Judging by IAB standards , 120 pixels fit the most common banner sizes. But even if we move on to the most cumbersome ones, we can still see that any derivative of 120 will accommodate the banner.

So basically what I really had to answer was: we were not interested in money, but advertisement was an issue when designing UX Magazine.

end of article

4 Comments

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foofighter
21 December 2005, 10:52 ( Permalink )
Dont worry,we (the audience) never thought that you wont have any banners on the site…
vyacheslav kaushan
22 December 2005, 21:27 ( Permalink )
Why are you not interesting in money? If you can get money for some good things, why not?
Looks like you hate to tell everyone then you need money and this ok ;)
All of us need money – for live, for creative etc. If you don’t them – send me your address – I want to visit you.

Good luck, altruists! ;)
KUB365
8 January 2006, 20:26 ( Permalink )
I never thought about creating a grid system to use when i design my UI. I will use this; as we are in the process of redesigning our site, thescripts.com (new version will be heavily focused on web based software and services).
MutantRobo
11 February 2006, 00:14 ( Permalink )
I actually don’t think you were incorrect when you answered the question that way because it particularly pertained to UX Magazine. If ads were considered to be a part of this site’s business objective, I believe it would have been taken into account when designing this site and possibly another solution would have been arrived at depending on requirements.

To me, the goal of this site seems be an informative forum, not a revenue generating ad-stravaganza, which I say kudos. Although, I wouldn’t be surprised to see an ad, at least I feel that you guys would integrate it so that it’s not so obtrusive.

Oh, and I honestly don’t think you needed to justify the design of UX Magazine after-the-fact, it is fortunate there are IAB sizes that work with the decided grid system, but again if ads weren’t part of the goal (or future goals), then it doesn’t matter.

Comments closed for this article.

About the author:
Constantinos Demetriadis
Art Director, OgilvyOne
Constantinos is employed as Interactive Art Director for OgilvyOne worldwide. In his ever dwindling spare time he works on the development of UX Magazine and Joblet. You can read his blog here.

IAB Banners

Wednesday December 21, 2005 by Constantinos Demetriadis

During the UX Magazine presentation at the Greek Design Panorama 2005 , right after I wrapped up my speech, I was asked a question from the audience which more or less was the following:

“This site, as you told us, has been built on an 8x grid, each column being 120 pixels in width, how do you see any IAB standard banners fitting into your design. Doesn’t the prospect of advertising concern you?”

I came to a quick response: “We’re not interested in money, so banners do not concern us”.

We’re not interested in money

I’d like to apologize to the inquirer publicly because my answer was just half true. I mean, we’re not doing this for money, if we were then this site would have been flooded with banners. The part that’s untrue is that banners don’t concern us. In fact I believe we’ve headed down the right alley when we decided upon the 8x grid and 120 pixel width columns.

IAB Standard Banners on our Grid

Judging by IAB standards , 120 pixels fit the most common banner sizes. But even if we move on to the most cumbersome ones, we can still see that any derivative of 120 will accommodate the banner.

So basically what I really had to answer was: we were not interested in money, but advertisement was an issue when designing UX Magazine.