Life Musings

A friend of mine showed me a copy of a marketing flyer that he got his hands on. It was from some guys who asked him to review this piece of work. I also saw another flyer that these dudes had produced.

They were atrocious. They were ugly, incoherent, and positively amateurish. They looked like they had been written by twelve-year-olds. As a writer, they made me cringe.

They violated every fundamental law of advertisement design. For one thing, they had no headlines -- nothing that would quickly summarize what the flyers were all about. There were no clear images of the product being sold. (One of them did have an image, but it was a faded photo that kinda blended into its background.) The text had been cut and pasted from a technical catalog. This was a poor choice, since such text is ill-suited for quickly summarizing a product's benefits.

People are busy nowadays, especially if they work in a technical field (science, engineering, medicine, law). You MUST catch their attention and communicate things quickly. Don't expect that they'll slog through your paragraphs of text, especially if the writing had not been finely tuned. In other words, it's not enough to simply have all the facts on paper. That's just poor judgment.

That's why these principles of good marketing design are so important. And heck, they're just a matter of common sense.

Here are some examples of attractive flyer design. You can't really zoom in on the text, but the design layouts look good. You can also see some well-design flyers here. In these examples, it's clear that the text and layout were painstakingly designed to communicate a lot of information quickly and efficiently.