JAMES kELSo oPYWRITER
For hire, by the day, by the job, by the light of the silvery moon.
WHAT EVERY COPYWRITER NEEDS IS…
…a good art director.
A good art director is one who is, above all, full of good ideas. So do your career a favour and get one. But surely there are loads of art directors with good ideas?
Oh yeah!
You know all those wonderful astronomy programmes on TV, where you travel through space with all the stars rushing towards you? The scientists aren’t looking for new planets, or the origins of the universe. They’re searching for an art director who can come up with an idea to replace the tedious stars-rushing-towards-you cliché we’ve all seen a million times!
So, if you find a good art director, hang on to them.
And if you find yourself saddled with a ‘designer’, beware. There are some brilliant ones out there, and many who are really just art-workers shuffling elements around. If you’re saddled with one of those, try to subtly instruct the benighted soul in all the things design school forgot to mention. Such as the fact design is only one of the skills in an art director’s tool kit. The difference between a designer and an art director is an arguable point. But don’t argue it with me. I’ve had too much copy made invisible by insensitive treatment.
For most of my career I had the privilege of working with – and being taught by – the multi-award winning Pete Kettle. To him copy wasn’t just a grey area. He knew the cardinal rule of good typography is to be unnoticed. He understood ‘book rules’ rule. They rule as much today as they ever did. They’ve not been overtaken by technology, nor ever will be. He knew ‘timeless’ was worth more than ‘modern’.
One of the hardest things, possibly in all the arts, is to be simple. The best copy, by the best copywriters, can simply disappear in the hands of a bad designer. For example, one of the biggest stoppers to anyone reading a newspaper or magazine is the deadly phrase: ‘Clockwise from above’ concerning captions to a group of photos.
Why doesn’t the art editor put captions in the traditional place below the images? Because that would ‘spoil’ their beloved layout, blemish their beloved white space – the blessed white space itself a hangover from the modernism of the Bauhaus, whose flat roofs continue to leak on into the 21st century.
Fact: twice as many people read captions as read body copy. Fact: serif type is easier to read than sans serif. The Bauhaus brigade ignores this. Why am I using sans? Because this is not paper and the rules for backlit text are different.
Good art directors know that in a crowded environment, if you want attention, speak low, and watch people crane forward to listen. ‘Bullet point’ prods-in-the-chest push people away.
Of course design is always ‘horses for courses’. Quality products deserve quality graphics. I expect my Mercedes to be as well crafted as their logo. That’s the promise the logo holds.
Am I saying there’s no room for brash? No, of course not. Six Garage Glasses For Sixpence demands brashness along with its excitable screamers – those marks of the excitable writer.
One last thing.
Unless you’re very confident, beware of doing your own art direction. Why? Because way back, the late, great Steve Jobs, had a hand in commissioning his first logo for Apple. Go find it online. You’ll see what I mean.
Talking of Apple, it’s said the bite out of the Apple logo honours Alan Turing, the great mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist, who died by his own hand eating an apple filled with cyanide. Apocryphal story or not, the logo is a classic. It is, I believe, the only logo that’s never been used with the name to support it. It does all the work on its own, with no explanation.
That’s confidence. That’s a designer I could work with. If they’d have me.