Creative & Copywriting: Raise the Bar With Common Sense Creative

Lackluster, nondescript and misinformed creative is a problem that’s actually getting worse despite the sophisticated tools creatives have at their fingertips. This malady is rampant in the design world. It’s often caused by thoughtlessness or lack of experience or training on the part of those who are given the job of design, copy and production of your email program, catalog or website.

While it’s easy to point the finger at our creatives for the diminishing standards, it’s just as much the responsibility of the one who hires and manages them to look over their work. They must ask themselves if the work is intelligent, if the employee is doing the best job he or she can to sell the company’s products and/or services.

Designers aren’t being encouraged to perform at a higher level. They shouldn’t be tasked with making a marketing campaign more creative, but instead making it work hard and effective enough that prospects will actually respond.

This column shares a few examples of ineffective creative work. It discusses the issues at hand and suggests how the work could be better and why it would perform better.

Typography: If You Can’t Read it, We Can’t Read it
The barriers that designers use to keep folks from reading advertising and marketing messaging are astonishing. You’d think they actually didn’t want people to read their copy.
Sadly for designers, pictures only get a prospect’s attention — and that’s only if it’s a good image and relevant to the reader. Copy is the thing that tells them what they’re looking at, what the offer is and why they should buy from you. Reversing body copy out of a busy photograph shows no common sense, nor does putting white type on a pastel background and assuming someone will actually go to the trouble of reading it. There are countless studies that prove how poorly these efforts fare and how their easy-to-read counterparts win the day.

Legibility shouldn’t be a challenge for designers to “make good” on. I was stunned to get a birthday card with a gift coupon from Chico’s. Not because it’s such a nice gift, but because of its white type on an orange background shows such a lack of common sense. Chico’s isn’t the only guilty one though. I often see websites and printed materials with yellow and pale green type on white backgrounds. Who’s reading this stuff? Certainly not consumers.

I love color as much as the next guy, but only a junior designer — or someone who really doesn’t give a hoot about whether someone reads the message — would make some of these design flubs. The designer in me weeps over the continued proof that for many designers and production people there’s simply no brain attached to their wrist. Use of color continues to evade most designers, who have learned how to use layout tools but clearly have never been schooled in color theory. The incorrect use of color will sabotage your effort in any medium.

The use of color in type can get very tricky if a designer doesn’t pay attention. Using a red type against a gold background, for example, simply doesn’t work because the colors are too similar in both value (dark to light) and actual color content.

When given a challenge, many designers use special effects like drop shadows and outlines to “save” an unreadable situation — often unsuccessfully.

This is an example of too much color and not enough discipline. The color saturation of the background photo is overwhelming the inset photos so the eye can’t distinguish where one begins and the other ends, even with the blue frames. Which, by the way, are too close in value to separate the insets from the background. Then the designer added a strong gold type. The ad obviously didn’t read well enough so they tried a drop shadow, which sadly still didn’t do the trick. Type is best read against neutral and flat backgrounds. This ad didn’t stand a chance.

When I was far more junior, I allowed a client to talk me into this exact same scenario and I always regretted the campaign’s lack of impact when it printed. The piece will simply never perform as well as it should if designed correctly.

The other end of the spectrum is the subtle and pale category. As pretty as this ad was to the designer, readers will likely ignore it because it’s frankly too hard to read and not enough of a draw to keep their attention.

Try a Few Solutions and Choose the Highest Contrast
When you’re working with type, often the first color solution doesn’t work. The chart below shows just how differently type looks and reads when treated in different colors.

There’s no need to even guess which ones your eyes went to first. The highest contrast examples always win. The worst performers in terms of legibility and response are the ones that have the lowest contrast — the red/green (same value even though they’re different colors) and the white type on pale backgrounds. Color is a broad topic that really deserves its own column, but the basic idea is that difference in color/dark-light value is what makes type easy to read. If there’s not enough contrast, readers’ eyes simply ignore the message.

This has been proven in scientific studies and isn’t open for debate with your designer. If the type and background are too similar in value, keep working at it until it’s really easy to read. If the color is light, use black type or a very dark gray to write your message. Keep the word “contrast” at the top of your list of design tools.

Carol Worthington-Levy is founder and creative director of Worthington-Levy Creative, a multichannel marketing creative consulting firm. Reach Carol at cwl@worthington-levy.com.