 Great photo by Grok. We recently worked on a book project, wherein we worked closely with the author (to be specific, we ghost-copy-edited the manuscript), and we were also involved, as a creative resource, when it was time to create the book’s cover. We had a great graphic artist we were working with.
All of this will tie in—shortly—to the gist of this article: Directing other creatives. There’s certainly a fine line between over- and under-directing them. So how do you find that sweet spot? Quick tangent about book design. Regardless of the cute aphorism you were taught in grade school, we all judge books by their covers. In a word, Duh! That’s what they’re there for. You wouldn’t buy a technical how-to guide with a cover that teased a torrid romance, or vice versa. The cover needs to inform the would-be reader of what's inside. It’s as important to the book’s success as a poster is to a movie, or even further back in the day, what a record sleeve was to an album. (Contact us in case you don’t get either of those references.) So. Having worked with the author on this project, literally word-by-word, for months, we knew very well what the book was about. Far more than, say, our great graphic artist. Which is fine. It wasn’t her job to read the entire manuscript, and know who the target audience is, and all that. We knew that stuff. We also knew the mandatories for this project: For example, the author runs a company that figures prominently in the book; the company logo needed to be on the cover. Stuff like that. Who speaks what, visually We quickly pencil-sketched nine different thumbnails as cover ideas for the book. And here’s where it’s important to know your different players well. The author of this book is not a graphics person. So he basically understood the thumbnails, but didn’t get any of them. He needed to see his favorites fleshed out before he could pass any real judgment. So we sent these along to our graphic artist, with fairly minimal instructions. We walked her through each one, explaining its basic intentions, but carving absolutely zero elements in stone, aside from the aforementioned mandatories (company logo, company color palette, etc.). And in this process, we very purposely downplayed the quality of the thumbnails themselves. Sure, there was the very real possibility that one of them would end up being “the” one, and thus the germ of the final cover art. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to inspire our graphic artist to improve upon what we’d sent her. To, for lack of a better phrase, show off. The thumbnails weren’t so dumb as to be negligible. But they were loose enough to require input and interpretation. And that’s the fine line you want to walk when you’re directing a creative person. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Creatives are a lot like athletes. While many creatives are ostensibly introverted, they still yearn to be challenged, and to strut their stuff, to flex their creative muscles, so to speak, and to outdo themselves and what they’ve done before. The winnowing Despite what we’d hinted earlier, our thumbnails were actually clear enough for our client to pick a few favorites before we sent them along to the artist. This worked well: The client/author picked his three faves. We sent all nine to the graphic artist, with the three top choices highlighted; this way, she could see what the client had rejected, and possibly draw some inspiration from elements of the also-rans, if needed. This also had the very pragmatic effect of reducing time and budget. Having that artist work up nine different covers would be quite a bit of work. Three, on the other hand, was pretty reasonable. The good news: It was hard to choose among the three designs that the artist submitted! We had our favorite; the author had his. Guess who prevailed? Of course. The author. It’s his book, not ours. And his choice, while not our tip-top choice, was still among our favorites—and that’s counting back to the original nine. From that point, it was just a matter of iterating and refining. As we write this, the art is finalized, and the book is at the publisher. Importantly, everyone is happy. Our client has a great book cover (by which others will rightly judge that book!). Our graphic artist is justifiably proud of her creation. And we’re delighted to have helped the process along, walking that fine line between over- and under-directing our precious creative resource. Need help with a challenge like this? Contact us. We’d be happy to help.
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 Great photo by Designecologist. We know a talented web designer who told us that websites age in dog years. That may well be true of the technology. But in this article, we’re going to talk about your branding and your messaging.
If you’re considering a refresh of your site, or perhaps even a wholly new site, this article is for you. Even if a potential rework is way in the future, you can still learn some good time- and expense-saving tips here. So read on! Website in the spotlight We have a client whose business recently pivoted from serving mid-level customers to very high-end customers. (We can’t give too much detail here, but there should be enough info for you to follow the story.) The high-end prospects would be more profitable for our client. Making this choice to pivot was the result of a lot of soul-searching and analytical number-crunching. It represented a switch from serving a greater number of decent-revenue-providing clientele to a smaller number of awesome-revenue-providing clientele. As we’d said, we’re gauzing up this story. But you now know enough to follow it—and to see the parallels that exist to your situation, and your website. Ah yes. The website. The moment this client of ours decided to pursue a newer, higher-end audience, their existing website (not to mention all of their other marketing materials) immediately became outdated. It was way “beneath” their new audience—and wholly lacking in the newly-refined service offerings they had developed. Our client knew that this would be coming. Recall all of the aforementioned soul-searching and number-crunching. So they called on us to help them create the new website. We don’t do this alone. We work closely with the client. They have a great web designer, with a full team, that we love. We also have some great video editors to help create the site’s embedded content (which we scripted). But here, in this article, we’d like to walk you through the process we employed—and get to those elusive “pilot pages” that we’d mentioned in the title. Starting wide As we’d noted, the client had decided to serve a new audience. And if you’ve read any of our articles here at Copel Communications, you can practically do a drinking game for each time we mention “taking a customer-back approach.” We’re passionate about this. (Because it works!) In other words, start with the customer. Explore their needs. Then work backward to the marketing strategy and tactics. So here are the big things we did with this client, in order:
Exciting new subhead: Pilot pages! Mind you, all of the work we’d described above is upstream of the web designer. Why? Two reasons:
So what are these teased-to-death-by-now “pilot pages”? It’s actually really simple. Despite the wonderfully described tone from the chosen narrative creative concept, it’s time to create actual public-facing website copy at this point. So should you unleash your writer—even if it’s us—to pen all of these pages at once? You have, after all, an approved concept and a signed-off wireframe. Answer: No. Again, you want to be efficient and frugal. So go through your wireframe and pick out just a few—two, maybe three—pages that would be good tests of the final tone-and-feel verbiage. These will be your “pilot pages.” They’re easy to choose—but hard to write. Expect a bunch of revisions. But once you lock them down, the other pages go way, way faster. The obvious one to start with is the home page. That’s mandatory. After that, it depends on which one you think would be 1) difficult, 2) representative, and 3) a good model for subsequent/deeper pages. That last point is especially important if you’re going to be engaging a team of writers: You want them to be able to reference the approved pilot pages, and use them to make sure they’re sticking to the proper tone. Incidentally, once you have your approved pilot pages, you can then feed them, with confidence (along with the approved narrative creative concept and wireframe), to your web designer. From that point, it’s off to the races. Need help with your next website project? Contact us. We’ve done lots of these, and would be delighted to help with yours.  Great photo by Moose Photos Oooh. Now there’s an intriguing title, isn’t it? Especially if it’s posted by Copel Communications, where we specialize in writing.
How can you say organized without reading? Think about it. Everything you employ to stay organized—such as calendars, emails, and files—all require reading. Is there some secret trick? Why it’s hard There are countless articles out there about getting your business organized. And lots of them are self-serving: They’re basically promoting Slack, or Asana, or Evernote, or Things, or Monday, or Trello, or OmniFocus, or Habitica, or Notion, or Todoist, blah, blah, blah. You get the idea. So we’ll go you one better. Not only will we show you how to get better organized without reading, we’ll also show you how to do it without purchasing any new apps. Take that, Slack! Or Asana. Or Evernote. Or.... well, you get the idea. What don’t you read? There are basic sensory inputs that you can use, and respond to, which don’t require reading. There are, we suppose, scents. Or even tastes. But we’re not going to suggest lemon-flavored sticky notes. (Do those even exist?) Stay with us on this. (If you’re not ahead of us already.) There are sounds. Come to think of it, you already rely on a ton of these all the time. There are alerts for every time you get a text message. Or an email. And of course when your phone rings. There are even little sound effects embedded within LinkedIn: when you successfully make a post or reach out to a connection, you'll hear a little click or warble. Conceivably, you could use sounds to help you get organized; you could create your own, and link them to certain events, and spend you day, Pavlov-like, waiting for the next ding. Naaah. That ain’t it. There are also tactile cues. If you have low vision, you may already rely on a Braille reader. Your phone likely has haptic feedback: When you type or select an icon, you can feel a little click or buzz to help reinforce the action. That’s good. It’s out there. But it’s not something you’ll create yourself. Which leaves one more choice. The universal language The Big Element here is color. It’s so simple. Yet so astonishingly under-used for productivity purposes. We learned about this trick decades ago, in which someone we respected used different-colored index cards to create a project. All the things relating to Topic A would be yellow, and all the things relating to Topic B would be blue. When this person put the deck in order, they could easily see, simply by looking at the stack of cards, how evenly divided the project was between Topics A and B. Brilliant. Picture that: A little deck of cards, sitting atop a desk. You look at the stack, and if there’s a big cluster of blue in there, you’d know the project needed adjusting. And you'd never read a word. Even though each index card was covered with words. Now fast-forward from the age of index cards, to the days of mobile devices and computers. Some of this you may be doing already. But there are opportunities to expand on this. Your calendar program—whatever it is—lets you create categories, and assign colors to them. So if, say, your “Personal” category is blue, and your “Work” category is green, you can see your work-life balance when you simply zoom out to the week, month, or year view. You'd never read a single word. And you can add categories that are similarly color-coded. We know a guy (admittedly an old-fashioned one) who sets his daughter’s category in pink, and his son’s in blue. (His wife? Purple. Stuff he hates doing? Brown.) Read without reading Here’s another. In Word (or any word processor, for that matter), you can set text in different colors. You’ve surely used red to call out important stuff. But we’ll also use colors like gray to denote work-in-progress passages that likely will get deleted later, or simply pastes of source material, to set them apart from the passages we’re actively working on. Again, like a calendar, you can zoom out—to the point where the text is too small to read. Which is what you want! Like our old friend with the deck of index cards, you can see how a Word doc is stacking up, in terms of its content balance. Mac-specific tricks Here at Copel Communications, we use Macs. So here are some tricks you can employ if you use them, too. (There are likely Windows analogs for everything we’re about to suggest here.)
These are just a few tricks. Do you have others to share? Contact us. We’d love to learn them!  This is one of those provocative subjects that, theoretically, we could argue in a single sentence. But it requires some setup and context, and deserves a fleshed-out explanation.
But first: What on earth are we talking about? What’s the intent of the headline of this article? Why would you, as a creative professional (or someone who hires one) ever consciously go against your own creative instincts? Why would you ever make a creative choice that you don’t like? Talk about counterintuitive. The germ of this article came from a recent situation with a client of ours. We had worked with them for months to do painstaking customer discovery. It’s one of our specialties—it’s pretty much our religion—here at Copel Communications. Through lots of structured conversations, we had worked with this client to narrow down their targeted audience to just two big buckets. Then we worked with them to understand each of those audience’s day-in-the-life concerns and needs and comfort zones. Always, always “work backward” from the customer. If you know what the customer is going through, and what they need, then it becomes straightforward (albeit not easy) to start with that, and then “back into” the best possible messaging. Indeed, you can also “back into” the best possible products and services, too, but that goes a little beyond our wheelhouse. So. For this client, we’d helped them uncover some really interesting things about their target customers, for both buckets. While they were certainly distinct in terms of what they each needed and wanted most, which strongly suggested serving them via a bifurcated website (we have a very helpful article on this exact topic), they did have a fair amount in common, too. For the purposes of this article, let’s say that these target audiences each wanted a Lexus-like look and feel, yet with the suggestion of more Toyota-like pricing to purposely undercut the upscale look and feel. Pretty neat, huh? Unpleasant surprise So you can imagine our surprise when, one day, this client sent us a brochure they’d created on their own. It featured lots of big, cartoony graphics and bold/daring layout: for example, on each page, the single biggest element on that page was the page number itself. Oh boy. Why did they follow this route? The piece was certainly bold, but 1) it looked like a student project, and 2) it wholly ignored everything that had been learned during the intensive customer-discovery sessions we’d conducted, and documented, with this client. Here’s the short answer: The graphic designer they found and hired simply liked this stuff. He liked cartoons and huge page numbers. Do our client’s prospects feel the same way? Absolutely not. So this brochure would turn them off, simply by looking at it, without so much as reading a single word. Thus the headline of this article: When should you avoid creative choices that you, personally, like? Answer: Whenever they conflict with what the customer would most like to experience. As we’d said above, straightforward. But not simple. Another example Years ago, we did work for an ad agency, and the owner told us a great, and related, story, which we’ll paraphrase here: The ad agency conducted market research for one of their clients: A nationally-known maker of a certain line of consumer packaged goods. The ad agency’s job: See which colors would resonate most with targeted buyers. (You know where this is going already, don’t you?) So the ad agency commissioned original, confidential market research, in which lots of mock-up products, in lots of different colors, were presented to the target audience via methods such as surveys and focus groups. The findings were clear and unequivocal. There were certain colors that were really liked, and others that were really disliked. When the ad agency presented these findings to their client’s CEO, she disagreed. She was certain that certain colors—the ones that she liked—would do better in the marketplace. She imposed her will, and so those colors—and not the market-tested ones—went into production, and then on sale. Guess what happened? All of the colors picked by the CEO absolutely tanked in sales. The one or two, from the market research, which she had allowed to go into production, soared. We don’t know the rest of that story. We hope it became a teachable moment for that CEO. But it certainly backs up what we’ve said for years: If you’re looking to grow your business, always subsume your own desires to those of your customer. Have a customer-discovery challenge that needs cracking? Contact us. We’ll help you move forward.  We’ll start this article with a true—and embarrassing—story.
Ages ago, when computers first hit the scene, we needed to produce a couple of radio spots for a client at the ad agency where we worked. We realized that there was a lot of overlap between the two scripts, so we were able to use this exciting new feature, “copy and paste,” to help us along. It was like magic. Then, when it was time to take the playback from the studio, we had a dreadful realization: We’d effectively copied, and pasted, the wrong stuff. Both scripts were messed up—and both scripts got produced. We had to get the announcer back in the booth, and the engineer back at the board, and start all over again… only after they had to sit there and wait for us to fix (and double-check) the new scripts and fax (yes, fax!) them over. Ugh. Between the early PCs and the fax machines, the above story might appear terribly outdated, if not quaint. But it’s actually as relevant as ever. Ignore it at your peril. Bottlenecks in the spam factory These days, we—and you—are tasked with sending out a lot of marketing material, to lots of different audiences. And, just as in the story from ages ago cited above, there are overlaps. Audience A likely wants about 75 percent of the same stuff as Audience B. Sometimes it’s 99 percent. But beware that last percent. It can absolutely kill you. Let us explain. As an English-speaking human being, you can tell, instantly and instinctively, when something is off. It can be off by just a fraction of a percentage point, and you’ll know it. From the “English-speaking” perspective, you’ll notice it when you get that “official” email from your bank (or utility or Facebook or whatever) saying that you need to take action immediately. The thing might look official, but it just doesn’t read right. No legitimate corporate communication would read that way. Your Spidey Sense tingles, and you’re on the alert for a scam. From the “human being” side, there’s the infamous Uncanny Valley. This is, in case you were unaware of the term, that skin-slithering feeling you get when you see computer-generated characters of people that are very realistic but are off by just enough to make them creepy looking… “The Polar Express,” anyone? So. You can perceive this stuff, innately, as a recipient. Therefore, you need to be extra careful when you’re a transmitter. Ain’t as simple as it seems Here’s a nice concrete example for you. Let’s say you’re creating a campaign aimed at banking executives. They have customers. Now let’s say you’re doing the same campaign, except for credit unions, which are ridiculously similar to banks. But do they have “customers”? Oh no! They have members. If you get that one word wrong in your search-and-replace from Banking Version to Credit-Union Version, you’ve wasted your entire campaign. Worse, you’ve offended that audience with your ignorance, to the point that you’ve damaged your brand, and they’ll look at any future marketing communication from your firm with skepticism. Now let’s say the campaign is targeting healthcare insurers. They don’t have “members.” But they don’t call the people who pay for their services “customers,” either. They’re patients. For property-and-casualty insurers, they’re policyholders. And this is just a single, single-nomenclature example. Just like the Uncanny Valley, if you get just one word wrong, you can come across as tone-deaf or just plain ignorant. So our advice is: Be careful. Proofread assiduously. Know, in the back of your mind, that you can still screw this up. Even without a fax machine. Need help with a creative marketing challenge? Contact us. We work on assignments like these all the time.  First things first: Lots of people already know what a responsive website is. If you’re one of these people, you don’t have to read this article. (Although you still may gain an insight or two.)
But more often than not, here at Copel Communications, when we mention “responsive website” to clients or prospects, we’re answered with a blank stare. It’s not really a term you hear bandied about very much. Which is odd, because responsive websites are pretty much the norm nowadays. So what are they? What makes them different from, oh, say, non-responsive websites? Do you need one? And if so, how can you get one? Two steps back Before we answer all of those questions, let’s step back and consider some basics about web design. Let’s start with the most basic question of all: Why does a website exist? Cue the Jeopardy! “think” music here... Correct: A website exists to serve up information in an easy-to-consume fashion. There ya go. Think of it this way: After the advent of the internet, but before the advent of the World Wide Web, you could get information online. It was in things like bulletin boards and long scrolling pages of text with no images. Sounds horrendous, because it was. Although it was actually ground-breaking at the time—just being able to access that info from pretty much anywhere. The web, as we know it today, simply made that same information easier to consume... if the then-new technology was utilized properly. The same guideline applies today: If you use small, light gray text atop a white background, it will still be hard to read, and absolutely no service whatsoever to your audience. So. The web introduced HTML (hypertext markup language) coding, which allowed for the addition of pictures, and different fonts and colors and boxes. So no matter how you got yourself to the web, whether it was a PC or a Mac or it was the Netscape Navigator browser or Firefox or whatever, you’d see the same thing. It imposed order on everything, and democratized the viewing of content, much the same way that the PDF imposed order on what had been a Wild West of fonts, pixels, and vector art. Things move forward The exciting advantages of basic HTML had their limits. You couldn’t select the exact font you wanted. You were limited to basic running text. Laying out for the web was more an exercise in geek-like coding than artistic page design. But the technology advanced. There were frames (remember those?), in which there would basically be a horizontal or vertical divider on a page, with each side supporting its own discrete content, which could scroll separately from what was beside or above it. Sounds liberating, but it was actually maddening for viewers, who were stuck trying to scroll inside little walled-off areas of a page. Not exactly “content served up in an easy-to-consume fashion.” Shortly after that came “Web 2.0,” which is basically the addition of functionality in which the viewer can also post information. Voilà: Facebook. That doesn’t affect our “responsive website” discussion very much. (You thought we’d lost the thread? Shame on you.) But the advent of new devices does. The iPhone is really what changed it all: A tiny portable device that could view web pages. This was followed by all other brands of smartphones, plus iPods, iPads, and other tablets, you name it. Lots of different screen sizes—on screens that automatically change their orientation from portrait to landscape when you physically pivot them—and, later, with ever-higher resolutions, too (think “Retina Display”). A new sheriff in town From the minute the iPhone launched, every website on earth became outdated. Because it would look like junk on the iPhone. If the iPhone had never taken off, nothing would have changed. But it did, and the world was forced to adapt. In the early days, there would be the “mobile version” of any given website. Mind you, this needed to be created separately, and hosted and updated along with the “desktop” site. Clearly a huge pain. And sometimes you’d get the wrong site on the wrong device: Ever sit at your desktop machine and see a page with just three enormous buttons on it and not much else? That’s when you were served the wrong site, which often had an “m” in its URL, to signify “mobile version.” When tablets came along (again, Apple had the lead here with the iPad), this created more headaches for web designers: now there was a third version of any site to create and manage. It was time for someone to impose PDF-like order on the situation. Hence the “responsive website.” On the move A responsive website, quite simply, is one that automatically adapts to whatever screen it’s being viewed on. Amazing! It “knows” whether it’s being displayed on a desktop, laptop, tablet in portrait mode, phone in landscape mode, and so on. End of discussion. Right? Of course not. If it sounds too good to be true... Overall, we like responsive websites. CopelCommunications.com is responsive. If you’re on a desktop or laptop, test it out: Simply resize your browser window, and watch everything re-size and auto-populate on its own. Pretty neat. But there are some shortfalls. As a designer, your hands are rather tied when you’re working on a responsive website. It’s based on a template which uses an algorithm to determine what kind of screen it’s on and thus what-goes-where. So if you’ve got a two-line headline with a certain line-break that you love, don’t think that it will show up that way for everyone. It could be one line; it could be four lines. And the line-breaks will show up... wherever. Ditto for images, boxes, and buttons. They’ll move and wiggle and bounce and end up in usually a good position that affords readability... but not always. So what do you do? Two things: 1) Test, and 2) Compromise. It’s easy to test a responsive website you’re designing; all you need to do is re-size it onscreen. And of course you can view it on other devices. Look for visual issues you need to correct. And be prepared to compromise. It’s a basic trade-off of responsive websites. If you see an iteration that really looks awful, ask yourself 1) Can you live with that? 2) How many viewers from your target audience would likely see it that way? and 3) If you fix that configuration, how will it screw up all the others? Responsive websites are a great tool, but they can be tricky. Need help with yours? Contact us. We work on these kinds of projects all the time.  Learn how to improve beauty & readability at the same time
We read so much that it’s scary. You’re reading this sentence. How much else have you read today? How much more will you read? It can be tiring. Specifically, it can be more fatiguing than it needs to be. It can also be a heck of a lot uglier than it needs to be. We’re talking about letterspacing. Here’s a great quote: “The space between the letters should be determined by the space within the letters themselves.” It bears repeating. “The space between the letters should be determined by the space within the letters themselves.” Chew on that one for a second. We’ll circle back to it shortly. Pick a font, any font? Let’s start with some real basics here. Serif vs. sans-serif fonts. The serif, as you know, is that little flourish on the end of a stroke, like the little fingers that hang down from the top ends of a letter “T.” Tradition says that serif fonts are the best choice for body copy; the serifs themselves help to set the baseline and subtly align the text, helping the reader along. “Helping the reader along.” Another good quote. Sans-serif fonts, on the other hand, are traditionally employed for headlines, for bold applications. The all-time iconic sans-serif font is Helvetica. It’s ubiquitous to the point that it gets bashed and abused, but it’s iconic for a reason. Its elegance lies in its understated beauty. So. Serif for body copy. Sans-serif for headlines. Simple as that, right? Of course not. You know that here at Copel Communications, we’re avid fans of justified rule-breaking. There are times when you want to play against expectations, when you want to surprise your audience. Swapping out a serif font for a san-serif one, or vice versa, is the simplest example there is. Which gets us back to letterspacing. What’s missing from fonts Back in the day, each letter in the font had its own letterspacing built in. We’re not talking TrueType or OpenType. We’re talking metal. The word “font” shares the same root, in French, as “foundry,” which is where metal was melted down to cast actual fonts. (We know more about this than most people. Be sure to check out our killer blog, “We Bought Fonts at a Foundry.”) So each letter would have a certain amount of metal around it, to “automatically” provide the proper spacing vis-a-vis the ones beside it. Overall it worked well. But not perfectly. Look at any old book that was printed via letterpress. (If you’re not sure, simply feel the pages. The hard type makes a physical impression in the paper, in contrast to lithography, wherein the printing plates are smooth.) Now, look closely at the type itself. It will look, well, old. Something about it will appear amiss. And it’s the flawed letterspacing. The carved-in-metal dictates of the individual letters can’t possibly anticipate, let alone compensate for, the juxtaposition of letter pairs that require special spacing. We’re talking “V-A”, for example. The word “AVAIL,” in caps like that, generally looks horrible when it’s set in metal type. There’s all that dead space in the diagonal channels between the “V” and its pair of flanking “A’s.” It hurts your eyes, and your brain, to read it. Of course, we’re not setting type like that anymore. It’s all done via computer. And modern computer fonts do have algorithms baked into them to compensate for these special situations. Overall, they work quite well. They can scoot a “V” closer to an “A” without any need for, oh, shaving down a piece of metal! But computers and algorithms can only do so much. The rest is up to you. Get kerning That quote we’d cited above—“The space between the letters should be determined by the space within the letters themselves”—is from a great art teacher we’d had back in junior high school. Some wisdom just sticks. He was absolutely right. It’s not just “V-A.” It’s all the letters. A good font is an incredible creation: the way it appears aligned and uniform, when it’s actually an orchestration of careful cheats and eye-trickers, from the capital “O” that may descend beyond the baseline to the “fi” ligature which elides what would’ve been a distracting double-dollop between the serif on the “f” and the dot atop the “i.” The thing is, the beauty is in there. It’s up to you to liberate it, not constrain it, not shackle it. Our junior high teacher’s quote is as close as we can get to a “rule” here. This is art, not science. You need to play, to look at it, to experiment. Save your different versions and compare them. Sometimes you’ll want to break the rules: You’ll want to crash those letters together. Or you’ll want to stretch them out, airily, in order to underscore the message. Ditto for leading (pronounced “ledding”): the vertical spacing between individual lines. Use our art teacher’s guidance. Or creatively avoid it. Here’s the irony in all this. Done right, the best possible creation is practically invisible to the audience. It just... reads. It looks beautiful. It transmits its message. And that’s what type is supposed to do. Having trouble with that creative challenge? Contact us. We help clients of all stripes with these kinds of issues, and more, every day.  Technology doesn’t sit still. Chips get faster. Hackers get more creative, so software makers try and keep ahead. At the same time, these tech trends spawn their own design trends. Not long ago, whenever a new Photoshop filter came out, you’d see it in every single ad and image until you were quickly sick of it. Ditto for video effects like “the Matrix slow-mo” or the more recent “narrow focus to make big things like cars and cities look tiny.”
These are trends. Meaning, they come and go. Same thing happens when you focus on the realm of website design. New technology spawns new trends. Long ago, there was a big clamor about “Web 2.0”: it was a then-revolutionary idea that someone viewing a web page could actually alter that web page. Today, that’s, um, “Facebook.” So the tech trends, in website design, continue. There were “frames”; remember those? It was revolutionary at the time: within the same website page, you could, say, scroll through content in just the right column. Today, that’s largely, um annoying. Although it does persist in what are hopefully apt applications. More recent tech trends include animation that any processor (think “mobile phone”) can easily handle. This began as the “carousel” atop a home page, wherein, say, four or five key images and headlines would appear, sequentially switching to the next. More processing power (specifically, GPU or graphics processing unit) translates to more video power; that’s why you’ve recently seen more and more websites that actually include a loop of video running behind text on their home screen. It’s really easy to see the boundaries of this type of technology, as well as the limits they place on designers. If you come to a website with video playing as its “key art” imagery atop the page, simply count off the seconds to yourself until it repeats. That’s the “magic number” for how much video can be included. And guess what? If that @%$% video took forever to load, then that site made a mistake. They over-assumed for your device, your operating system, your browser. Here’s one more tech innovation which you’ve probably seen emerging as a website design trend: That “layered look” as you scroll down a screen. The text scrolls quickly, while the images behind it scroll a little slower, giving it a “Disney multiplane animation” effect to it. Designers have a say, too Not all website design trends are technology-based. There are cultural phenomena at work, too. Any hot franchise or look will affect designers. Back when Ken Burns’ breakout Civil War miniseries aired on PBS, it seemed you couldn’t find an ad that wasn’t presented as a sepia photo, with some announcer speaking, memoir-like, over a rustic piano score. Fast-forward to when Apple introduced the iMac. Remember that translucent blue plastic beach ball? Every product, from kitchen knives to vacuum cleaners, soon sported transparent blue plastic, and dopey names like the iKnife or iVacuum. (We just made those up, but wouldn’t be surprised if they really happened.) More recently, take a cultural phenomenon like Mad Men. It alone helped to bring back the look of the “Swinging Sixties,” in everything from iconography to fonts to color palettes. All of which leads to the million-dollar question: Which website design trends are most profitable for your business? Asking in reverse If you’ve read enough of these Copel Communications articles, you’ll know that we’re downright religious about taking a customer-back approach to marketing. Always start with the target customer: What they want. What problems they need to solve. Then back your solution into the answers to those questions. Website design is no different! You don’t want to ask, for example, “Should we use that huge-scrolling-page/no-links-whatsoever approach, or go ‘old-school,’ with a nav bar and discrete website pages?” That question will get you nowhere—or, worse, to the wrong place diametrically—because it’s the wrong question. You want to understand what your prospects want from your site and design for them. Take the choice noted above. Are your prospects more likely to visit your site from a desktop computer or a tiny little phone? A traditional layout suits the former, whereas the “big scroll” may better accommodate the latter. Here’s a good litmus test: Pretend you’re a prospect of your business, and then “visit” your proposed site yourself. How quickly can you get to the information you need to find? How easy is it to see and to digest? How clear and compelling is the call-to-action? Using this measuring stick, you’ll be able to quickly discard the trendier options. And we mean “trendier” in its most disparaging sense: stuff that was created just to stroke some designer’s ego, with zero consideration paid to the person actually consuming the content. Don’t opt for low-contrast text-on-background that’s pretty but hard to read. Don’t employ floating graphic bars or blobs that don’t help the viewer separate sections by color or intuitively drill down into content. Do cater to your visitor’s need to get a quick lay of the land, and drill down to what they need. It may sound old-school, because it is, but something as simple as an outline—as in big headline, medium-sized subhead, and then smaller bullet-point text—goes a lot further than some flashy mishmash of fonts, graphics, and countdown animations. We can’t tell you how many times we’ve clicked away from a website in frustration over junk like that which finally sent us packing. Your prospects will do the same thing. Get help We know about these trends, and which ones work and which ones don’t, because we toil in this realm daily on our clients’ behalf. Join them, won’t you? Contact us today to help your website grab you as much business as possible.  Each year, we wrap up our blogging at Copel Communications with a roundup of our top articles. In case you were unaware, we alternate our posts between our two core audiences (which certainly overlap): 1) consultants, and 2) creatives. And by “creatives,” we mean ad agencies and direct companies that turn to us for creative solutions, in marketing, advertising, and writing.
This post is a compendium of articles for the latter audience. (You can check out the one for our consultants here.) We think you’ll like these. If you’d missed any during the year, here they all are, replete with summary teasers and links. And hey, if you liked any of them the first time around, you may well enjoy a refresher!
Do you have a creative topic you’d like for us to address in the coming year? Or do you have a creative challenge you need solved? Either way, contact us. We’d love to hear—and to help.  Not long ago, before personal computers became ubiquitous, most people didn’t even know the word “font.” Which is interesting, considering that fonts have been around for hundreds of years. The word “font,” in fact, derives from the old French word fondre, meaning “to melt.”
Yes, melt. As in molten metal. Made in a foundry, hence “font.” Here at Copel Communications, we’ve been in this business for a long time. Not hundreds of years, thank you, but we did actually get our start in printing, and used to purchase fonts, wrapped in wax paper, and sometimes still warm, from a type foundry. (Read the details in this post, titled, not too surprisingly, “We Bought Fonts at a Foundry.”) So where are we going with all this? Like jingles (another great blog post topic), fonts have fallen in prominence recently. They’ve been overshadowed by flashy effects, say, in Flash. Or by trendy/unreadable page layout (we’re talking to you, Wired). All of that is sad. When PCs and desktop publishing first hit the market, America fell into an exciting new love affair with fonts. It was when the word itself permeated the popular vocabulary. It was the first time that everyday people saw the beauty, variety, and sheer power of fonts. It was a thrill to simply write a Word doc, and then “Select all” and see how it looked in different fonts. But then what happened? The torrid affair morphed into staid marriage. Today, we take fonts for granted. They’re an afterthought. They don’t get much love. Because we know they’ll just be there, silently doing their job. Don’t let that happen. A little more French for you If you’re a real font geek, you’ll know a lot of the nomenclature that’s used to describe a typeface or the characters within it. By the way, the term “leading” (pronounced “ledding,” not “leeding”), which refers to the amount of vertical white space between subsequent lines of text, derives from the fact that lines of text were originally separated by thin strips of, well, lead! You probably know that there are, broadly, two types (no pun intended) of typefaces: Serif and sans serif. A serif is merely that little flourish that completes a stroke; think of the "feet" at the base of a capital letter “T.” And while “serif” comes from the Dutch schreef, for “dash, line” the sans in “sans serif” is very much French; it simply means “without,” as in, “without serif.” And the final “s” is silent; “sans” rhymes with “John.” So what do you do with them? Interestingly—and because of the computer revolution—fonts apply to a lot more than graphic or printed layouts. Which is great! You can, and should, employ them to enhance the mood and power of virtually anything you create that has words in it: correspondence, PowerPoint decks, video titles, motion graphics, you name it. There are, unfortunately, a few notable exceptions: Web pages and email. We couldn’t, for example, select a favorite font for this article; we’re limited to the default fonts on the web page where it resides (whether it’s our own site, Copel Communications, or LinkedIn, or wherever), as well as how you’ve set your own browser, and the device on which you’re reading it, e.g.,desktop, laptop, phone, tablet, etc. The same constraints apply to email. That said, certain rules apply—and, just like any rules, they can be creatively broken when appropriate. The rules—tradition—dictate that you use serif fonts for body copy, and sans serif fonts for headlines. Modern sensibilities take another step: our world of social media has now equated ALL CAPS with SHOUTING, which you can use, or avoid, as you see fit. Then there are the decorative fonts (think of stencil type, round-hand script, or fonts evocative of the Old West or neon signs, whatever) that can really add impact—or, conversely, really look amateurish if over-used or (often) set in all-caps. For those, we like to choose them the way we choose stock photos: Create a little folder. Scroll through your (safe-to-assume) huge list of fonts, and drag the “contenders” into that folder. If you’re on a Mac, and you come across a really “hot” one, give it a “hot” label—such as a red tag—in the Finder. Once you finish all your scrolling, look at the folder of finalists. Again, if you’re on a Mac, instruct the Finder window to “Sort by Tag,” and all the “hottest” ones will rise to the surface. This is a way to quickly go from hundreds of choices to the vital few. Once you’ve chosen your fonts (and for many assignments, you’ll want to use numerous members of that font’s family, e.g.,Italic, Demibold, Black, etc.), treat them with love. Finesse the letterspacing to best showcase its beauty, while maximizing its readability. It may seem like you’re spinning your wheels, adjusting the kerning of, say, individual letters in a headline. But you’re not. There’s an ineffable power that comes from a perfectly-set block of type. Your audience will never think: “Wow! Great letterspacing!” But they will be moved by the power of what you’re saying, without even thinking about the font. It’s like the musical score in a movie: At its very best, you never even “hear” it. Same with fonts: Done right, your audience doesn’t “see” them. But boy are they ever moved by them. Need help with that next creative assignment? Our skills go way beyond picking fonts—but, as this article should make clear, we’re passionate about every element. Contact us now to discuss your next assignment. |