Review of Type and Layout by Colin Wheildon

How to use type and layout scientifically

Advertising isn't cheap. When you're spending hundreds -- even thousands -- of dollars on an ad campaign, you want to know that the latest scientific thinking has gone into creating an ad that will attract and compel readers.

Much of that thinking is crystallized in Type and Layout, recently revised by Australian editor Colin Wheildon.

As Wheildon points out, too much of today's advertising is governed by prima donna design boutiques that are more interested in competing for ad industry awards than they are in competing for your clients' attention.

In fact, many of the techniques that "look good" in their eyes actually distract readers from your message.

The classic example of this is white type on a black background, called a reverse. Wheildon's study found that readers are extremely likely to miss any message set in reverse.

Moreover, text in any colour other than black trips up your readers. If a black-and-white ad attracts 100,000 readers, putting the text in a colour such as hot red will attract 160,000. However, comprehension will drop from 67,000 readers to 27,000.

So coloured text actually loses readers. Likewise, four times as many readers understand black headlines as understand brightly coloured headlines.

This is just one example of how Wheildon's book turns subjective aesthetics into objective science. As advertising godfather David Ogilvy says in his foreword, "No guesswork here, only facts."

Ogilvy isn't kidding. The book is full of facts. Did you know, for example, that setting a headline entirely in capital letters cuts comprehension by as much as 20 per cent? Or that body text set in a serif typeface (such as Courier) is five times more likely to be thoroughly understood than text set in a sans-serif typeface (such as Arial)?

The 1995 update of Wheildon's book includes a whimsical chapter called "Eight Ways to Ruin a Perfectly Good Ad," a scathingly funny assault on bad design using actual ads as poor role models.

What's all the more remarkable is that the ads he savages come from large corporations that probably paid a great deal of money for extremely ineffective ads.

Type and Layout is available for $32.95(US) from Strathmoor Press at (510) 843-8888 or at 70523.3217@compuserve.com .

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