A SOS magazine ad for Ingram Engineering’s JNH688
This is the third ad I’ve designed for Ingram Engineering, and the brief had a familiar shape: a small page, a dense piece of hardware, and a reader who already knows what a preamp is supposed to do.
The placement is Sound On Sound. Specs were 3½ × 4½ inches, 300 ppi, PDF, with at least a quarter inch of bleed so nothing that matters is cut at the trim. That is not a lot of real estate. The job was to put the JNH688 — Ingram’s new dual-tube unit for recording studios, coming in 2027 — in front of engineers and producers without turning the ad into a spec sheet.
Eric wanted the box to carry the frame, the Ingram Engineering logo to sit where you couldn’t miss it, and one detail that the three-quarter product shot doesn’t give you: the glow of the tubes. So the ad runs two photographs. One is the unit in that familiar studio angle. The other is a tighter crop on the dual tubes, set on an opaque field so the light reads as the point, not as clutter.
That second image caused the only real fight with the file. The JNH688 title sits at reduced opacity so it picks up color from what’s behind it. The dual tube background was walking into the type. Masking and extra fades would have stacked more complexity onto a layout that was already tight. The cleaner fix was to stop guessing and calculate the fully opaque color values — 100% opacity — so the title held its color without the background bleeding through.
Copy had to shrink the same way. The meaningful specs stayed; the extra words didn’t. Recording people will get “mic/line,” tubes, and the clean-to-overdrive idea in fewer characters than a brochure would allow. That compression is the whole craft of a magazine ad this size.
Photoshop handled isolation, crop, and cleanup on the two photos and the logo. Illustrator took the layout: type, fades, opacity, bleed, and the 300 ppi PDF export SOS needs. We went through several versions. That’s the part that doesn’t show in the final file and is usually the reason the final file works.
Eric and I have been doing that kind of back-and-forth for a long time. We were housemates at Georgia Tech, with a band that made the workload survivable. After Tech we got serious. In the 1990s that band was BOB, out of Atlanta: five albums, DIY touring up the East Coast as far as Boston, down to Florida, and west to one outdoor set at Rice in Houston with a thunderstorm waiting on the horizon. If you visit the BOB site, that’s Eric on trumpet and me on guitar with pantyhose pulled over my head playing at the renowned CBGB in NYC. Building an ad with him feels like tracking a song. You listen, you cut what doesn’t serve the vibe, you leave the part that does.
Ingram will be at a sound-engineering convention in Nashville in October. If you’re there, look for the JNH688. If you need an ad, a logo, or a small-format piece that has to survive print and still look like the product, that’s the work.