Rick Taylor, Managing Director of Royston Simpson Creative, writes about the role of design in advertising…

Rick Taylor, Managing Director of Royston Simpson Creative, writes about the role of design in advertising…

“I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like” is a comment that the average consumer might make about advertising and packaging design, if they thought about it at all. Which is reasonable enough, because such design is not intended to intrude on a conscious level, but on a subliminal one, conveying a sense of ‘rightness’ or ‘fitness for purpose’.

A cartoon in Campaign, the ad industry journal, shows two housewives, one replacing a tin of beans on a supermarket shelf. “I would have bought it,” she says, “if the product title had been in 20pt Garamond Bold, but this doesn’t quite hit the spot for me”.

Yes, quite. But it begs the question of what does hit the spot? How can that sense of rightness or fitness for purpose be achieved?

David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy Benson & Mather, and grand-daddy of press advertising, used to be quite prescriptive about it. An advertisement should consist of a picture (featuring the product and occupying the top half of the ad); a headline (black on white) underneath it; followed by body copy (serif, never sans serif); and the company logo in the bottom right hand corner.

The result is, to say the least, staid and pedestrian by modern standards, but it does at least have the virtue of being legible – which cannot always be said of contemporary productions.

Nevertheless, times have changed, as has the means of production, and the sheer potential of digital technology has driven new advances in the craft and created new visual languages. Sometimes these have been indulged in for their own sake – programs like Quark, Photoshop and Illustrator have made possible weird multilayer images and geometric abstractions that look like technological nightmares. These are then combined with jumbled typography to make unreadable ‘communications’ that say little except ‘look how trendy and cutting edge we are’.

“…the sheer potential of digital technology has driven new advances in the craft and created new visual languages.”

In previous decades advertising has also borrowed from Surrealism and Psychedelia with similarly dubious results.

Having said that, advertising is more often than not about selling a lifestyle, and its design, if it is to be effective, must adopt the clothes and manners of its prospective clients. David Ogilvy’s one-size-fits-all is not well adapted to this.

The trick is to get the right balance between style and substance, fashion and function, the glamorous and sexy versus real human needs and wants (not that those are necessarily mutually exclusive!) Above all, it should not be forgotten that advertising design’s prime function is to communicate the message and sell the goods.

If you want a metaphor for good design, think of the ambience of a good restaurant. It’s not the meal itself, but it adds a great deal to the overall experience. It’s a matter of judicious window dressing and scene setting, of adding the appropriate accoutrements. It leads to the sentiment, as they used to say in that old commercial for Croft Original Sherry, that “One instinctively knows when something is right”.

Rick Taylor, Managing Director

Royston Simpson Creative