Lesson Eight: Advertising Science, Part I: Five Ways to Drive Away Readers Through Lousy Layout and Damaging Design

Chances are, you spend money on advertising or brochures or on printing on some piece of paper intended to persuade someone to buy what you’re selling.

Many graphic designers and ad men would have you believe that creativity is the key to profitable persuasion, but good ideas have a way of being lost in the quagmire of creativity gone astray.

Here are five ways guaranteed to lose readers. Follow them at your peril.

1. Disrespect the headline

The most important part of a print ad is the headline. You have less than a second to capture the attention of a reader. A well written headline grabs the reader and pulls him into the ad. So discourage the reader from reading by making the headline small, or better yet, hide it, stretch it, twist it, or otherwise distort it, so that the reader has to strain to understand the words. It’s a sure way to render your ad useless.

2. Disobey the law of Reader Gravity

Reading has it’s own physical law. Coined "Reader Gravity" by distinguished typographer Edmund Arnold, this law states that on any given page the eye is drawn to the upper left hand corner or "Primary Optical Area," scans across and down progressively through the "Axis of Orientation," and ends at the bottom right hand corner "Terminal Anchor." An image, headline, body copy, or logo layout that complies with Reader Gravity provides high readership comprehension. Disrupt it, say, by placing the headline in the middle of the body copy, and you reduce comprehension by 35% or more.

3. Get tricky with type

Print body copy in ALL CAPS and reduce comprehension by 30%. Use a sans serif typeface and lose 80% of readers. Reverse large amounts of type on black and 88% of people won’t fully understand what you’ve said.

4. Punctuate headlines

The simple act of placing a period at the end of a headline reduces readership by at least 10%. Periods indicate to readers, at least subconsciously, that they have come to an end point, allowing them to psychologically move on. Periods also indicate that what they are reading is an ad because editorial headlines rarely, if ever, use periods.

And finally,

5.Make the ad look like an ad

Since most people claim to hate advertising,make sure they know what they are looking at is an ad, and save them the bother of actually reading what you have to say.



Principles of Persuassion by Shane Spark