We have become an increasingly visual society in the years since the advent of television in the 1950s. If other web advertisers are emphasizing imagery, you can either choose to follow the prevailing attitude, or you can buck that trend - and possibly become more visible - by telling your story using only type and space, space and type. No imagery at all. The key is to impose the space on the type to make itself visible in the foreground.

Integrating type and space is not the same thing as just typesetting a headline. That puts space in the background, as usual, and is vanilla and supremely underdesigned, even if you pick a nice typeface. Too much credit goes to the type designer, not to you as the designer of an effective ad.

There are two significant considerations when choosing a typeface for an ad. One is the typeface(s) that the client uses for its overall branding efforts. Unless you have a really powerful reason otherwise, you should use that typeface to further their branding. The other critical consideration is what typeface is going to propel the message with greatest impact? A balance between simplicity of letterform, such as a bold sans serif, for example, and character will distinguish your ad from all others. Choose typefaces that are highly legible, yet have enough subtle quirkiness to be distinctive. A third—and far less significant—consideration is what typeface you, as the ad’s designer, like. Your favorite typeface may happen to coincide with a client’s real needs, but that doesn’t occur as often as we designers think it should. So attend to the first two considerations, and leave your current fave face on the desktop. Read more

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 14th, 2007 at 10:00 am and is filed under All, Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.