Catalog Doctor: Good Readability Makes a Healthy Catalog
The better your copy's readability, the more your response will increase. What if you could lift response 5 percent simply by switching fonts? You'd get an immense return on almost no investment.
The fashion in print right now is toward "clean" sans-serif fonts. Designers will often argue that people have seen sans fonts for so long that they've been trained to read sans as easily as serif, but that's a fallacy. Every decade someone makes that same argument — this was a big contention back in the '70s and '80s as well — and each time it's been proven wrong. We're talking basic brain chemistry at the subconscious level. The way the subconscious human brain decodes shapes and renders them into concepts hasn't changed in 10,000 years.
- Companies:
- McIntyre Direct
Susan J. McIntyre is Founder and Chief Strategist of McIntyre Direct, a catalog agency and consultancy in Portland, Oregon offering complete creative, strategic, circulation and production services since 1991. Susan's broad experience with cataloging in multi-channel environments, plus her common-sense, bottom-line approach, have won clients from Vermont Country Store to Nautilus to C.C. Filson. A three-time ECHO award winner, McIntyre has addressed marketers in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, has written and been quoted in publications worldwide, and is a regular columnist for Retail Online Integration magazine and ACMA. She can be reached at 503-286-1400 or susan@mcintyredirect.com.
