Designing ads and building landing pages for Pesto

Pesto is revolutionizing the way Indians look at education and career development. 

It has uplifted dozens of I.T workers from their mundane jobs and put them into the driver’s seat of careers that seem meaningful to them. Careers that let them hone their skills and grow alongside the company, as well compensate them the way that they deserve.

Through an intensive 12-week training program, participants of Pesto learn, unlearn, and relearn core business skills, soft skills, effective communication, and of course, advanced software engineering.

The Pesto programme is not for everyone. In fact, a typical Pesto participant usually has 2+ years of working experience prior to joining the programme. But Pesto places no restrictions on the people who can apply to the programme. It does not care about your degree, your credentials, or your CV.

As long as you have a body of work to prove your worth, and an innate drive to learn, Pesto will welcome you with open arms.

Then launch you to the career of your wildest dreams.


Pesto’s vision and philosophies resonate with me deeply, and this week, I’ve been building projects the way I would have if I had been working with them.

Project 1- Instagram ads

For my first project, I decided to design some ads to promote brand awareness, as well as improve brand credibility. It’s been an awesome experience.

(I built my ads on Canva, and I used Mediamodifier to create the instagram mockups)
In researching Pesto, I’ve learned that their ads mostly target two types of people.

The first category is prospective participants who are trying to understand if Pesto is worth their time and effort. The main problem here is not so much Pesto’s attractiveness (as Pesto makes a really good first impression) as it is awareness.

For ads targeted at participants, that’s something I tried to keep in mind.

The second category is hiring partners. Software companies, both in India and abroad want to know why they should hire Pesto’s engineers. For this both Pesto’s main curriculum and the extra benefits that it offers should be highlighted.
With these things in mind, I came up with this series of Instagram ads.

Ad#1

Target- Prospective participants who don’t know about the program.

Goal- Pique interest in exploring Pesto as the career accelerator of choice.

Thoughts- I wanted this ad to highlight all the fundamentals of Pesto in as few words as possible.

In essence, Pesto is a career acceleration platform that launches you to the job you love.

The red highlights this and goes well with the other colors of the picture.

I.T could be mundane and boring, so I made sure to contrast that with the picture of people laughing in the background that I found on their social media.

Pesto’s “make money only when you do” is another key feature of Pesto that I wanted to highlight with the caption. Specific details with the numbers add a little bit more to the clarity.

Ad#2

Target- Any company looking for I.T talent.

Goal- Get companies to start hiring from Pesto.

Thoughts- There are two main things I wanted to highlight with this ad.

Firstly, I wanted companies to understand that Pesto offers the best I.T talent they could be looking for.

Secondly, I wanted to add to the appeal by saving their time. Pesto, as a matter of policy, always gets back to prospective hiring companies with a list of devs perfect for them, within 72 hours.

Companies fill out a questionnaire detailing their project and Pesto schedules interviews for them, taking care of all logistics. I wanted to highlight this by specifying “72 hours” in the ad.

To save more time, the link to this ad will take companies directly to Pesto’s questionnaire form so that
They can begin their hiring process immediately.

Ad#3

Target- All prospective participants

Goal- Drive awareness.

Thoughts- I wanted this ad to feel positive and attractive. Pesto really prides itself on its community, and I wanted people to want to be a part of it.

I found a really good image on their social media to make the background and wrote positive content for the caption and fore text. The write ups are intentionally somewhat vague, as I wanted the picture to do most of the talking.

With this ad, I want the reader to feel interested in exploring further. The link will take him to Pesto’s home page where he could learn more about the company.

Even if he’s not a great fit, this ad will help to build brand awareness and identity among the people.

Ad#4

Target- Hiring Companies

Goal- Establishing Credibility

Thoughts- I designed this ad as a signal of credibility for hiring partners. As such, I wanted to keep the text simple and impactful.

The text “Proven in Silicon Valley” is designed to act as a  mark of competence.

Simple white against black worked best.

Pesto has a few really good testimonials on their “hire a developer” page, so any person who would want to research this will be left with a pretty good impression. I would link the ad to lead to this page directly.

With my caption, I wanted to give the reader somewhat of a challenge on our credibility. My intent was to ensure the viewer felt like he wanted to verify these claims for himself, and thus finds his way to our home page.

Project 2- Landing pages.

For my second project, I built landing pages for two events conducted by Pesto. Pesto conducts webinars, conferences, and networking events pretty frequently, so having good landing pages can always be valuable to them.

I wanted to keep the write-ups in the pages simple and to the point, as events were already going to be promoted via ad campaigns on social media platforms.

My goal was to give a simple yet attractive explanation of the event and filter out the right audience for them. For many of Pesto’s events, having work experience in I.T is either mandatory or highly recommended, and I wanted to highlight this on my pages.

This is what I came up with-

Landing page 1

(Here’s a link to the site!)

(Psst… if you dont want to read the text below, here’s a video covering everything)

My first landing page was built for Pesto’s event “Talk tech to me!”. “Talk tech to me” was a physical event conducted by Pesto back in September 2019. They had guest speakers talking about high-performance computing and its relevance in the education of tomorrow.

I went through the itinerary of the program to find out the actual points of discussion by the speakers and tried to incorporate them in the cards section.

The entire website was built on Webflow by using two layouts, and adding some sections manually at the end. The first section is the hero overlay with the big background image and the CTA button. Below that is the cards section with the images of the speakers and the descriptions. I edited the cards section a little bit to suit the spacing. The elements at the end are manually added.

I tried to design a page that could be seamlessly integrated onto Pesto’s actual website. Therefore, I used the same colors on my text and buttons as they do. I also tried to use the same font, but I couldn’t find the exact font they were using anywhere, so I went with a close replacement.

The images of the speakers come from Pesto’s actual social media promotions.

Landing page 2


(Here’s a link to the site!)

(Another video alternative to the text below)

I learned that the speaker at the event had created some really cool projects in the past, and I wanted to highlight them in the description

 (excerpt from the speaker’s website)
This became my first line on the landing page, designed to hook people in.

Like the previous page, seamless integration was important for me, therefore I again used the same fonts and colors as Pesto uses. Or got as close as I could.

With this event, some I.T work experience was mandatory, so I also made a registration form with the landing page. I made answering “What’s something specific you want to learn from our webinar” compulsory, as I think that would help Pesto decide who they want to send out invitations to.

The image for the landing page comes from the speaker’s website, whom I also researched a little bit to write out the description.


It’s been an awesome experience building these projects. Over the last week, I’ve learned new tech tools like webflow and canva, and the way to write effective copy. I’ve also learned more about Pesto, the people behind the company, and the philosophies defining them.

Developing marketing campaigns and building landing pages has certainly piqued my interest, and it’s something I’ll keep improving in the months to come.

Hope you found that this project was valuable for you.

I’ll be back next week with another, see you then!

2 Replies to “Designing ads and building landing pages for Pesto”

  1. Hey, went through your whole project and I think you did an excellent job on the landing pages and ad#2. With ad#4 your intent was in the right direction but you had to go an extra mile for a better tagline. All in all,well done!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *