The danger of getting too creative with type
My wife dragged me to a mall recently and I ran across a good example of why getting super creative with type endangers legibility.
Take a look. (Forgive the poor quality of the photo. I snapped this with my cell phone.)
Sure, you can tell that it reads “SALE.” But it takes a second for your brain to make it out, doesn’t it?
This sign violates two basic principles of legibility. It spells a word vertically rather than left to right, which is the standard in English. And it crams the letters together so that the familiar configuration of the word is damaged.
Now take a look at an example of good legibility just a few stores down in the same mall.
Same word, but it reads left to right and uses the natural shape of the word to make it instantly recognizable. The brain doesn’t need to read this sign, it recognizes and understands the word “sale” instantly.
From a designer’s perspective, the creative sign is more interesting. But that’s irrelevant, since the purpose of the sign is to announce a sale and bring people into the store. All things being equal, the less creative sign is more interesting to customers since they’re interested in the sale, not the sign.
By the way, you should also note that the less creative sign uses the colors red and yellow, which are more dramatic than the soft blue of the other sign. Plus it adds some copywriting savvy by calling the sale an “ultimate sale” and providing some detail on the number of styles marked down.
I recently referred to an article that provides a primer on reading and legibility in design. If you didn’t read it then, read it now. Even if you’re not a designer, you need to understand these ideas since most direct response advertising is about reading.
(Oh, and for the people out there who hate shopping but get suckered into malling anyway, this illustrates a great way to eat up time when a mall is about to close. Announce that you have an idea for your blog and take photos. Don’t take the pictures when you first see a good subject. Walk way past it, then say you have to go back. Then fiddle with your camera for a while. If you’re good, you should be able to reduce your shop time by 10 minutes or more.)
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“…But it takes a second for your brain to make it out, doesn’t it?…”
That’s the point. All good advertisements are small puzzles. Take any of the award winning ads; they engage the reader into figuring out what the ads really says. Normally you cannot say it in the first look. Typical twists are employing metaphors, abstraction or cause-&-effect types.
You can see the same thing in news headlines.
Example:
1) Hillary poll figures are going down
2) Down’Hill’
The employment of a pun (twist) in the second headline will make people interested in it (click it online) more than the normal headline.
Normally these types of ads have high recollection value than direct ads.
Are they effective? That depends on how the ad is constructed with a twist. If the twist is too difficult to untangle, then the ad is a wasted one.
The current sale ad in question can be easily figured out and conveys the message. It serves its purpose.
Respectfully, I could not disagree more.
Ads should NEVER be puzzles. Ads are meant to sell things. The harder you make it for people to understand the point, the less you sell.
I’d like to see how clever you’d be if you had a million dollars of your own money riding on an ad.
That first ad is truly horrible. I agree with the idea that ads should be direct, to the point, yet catchy.
The first ad is none of the above.
I agree with you Dean. Inspiring curiosity about the advertisement itself only serves to detract from the message.
What’s worse is that such advertisements actually make people skip it altogether. They have better things to do with their busy lives than to figure out puzzles. It is important to remember that the average person must filter over 3,000 such messages every day to find something pertinent to their needs.
Make the product the star, not the advertisement itself. What a total waste of money.
The first ad is truly a mess. rather than being catchy which the designer might have expected it to be it has spoiled the piece itself.