Page 198 - 100 Great Copywriting Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

2. Punters aren’t interested in logos. “Make the logo bigger” is a
fairly common request from inexperienced marketeers. Perhaps
not realizing that punters are rarely interested in logos, they
push the size up to the point that it drags the eye away from the
selling copy.

3. Make it legible. It’s common—as well as commercial—sense to
set your type in a point size your reader can read easily without
recourse to glasses. Ditto a typeface that makes reading easy,
rather than a challenge. Slimbach, for example, or good old
Times Roman.

4. Don’t write to fit. Just because you can fit 750 words in Arial
10-point onto an A4 page doesn’t mean you should. Unless you’re
writing a book, you need to leave your designer some room for
images, forms, white space, direction indicators, call-outs, and
so on. Less is more.

5. Keep things simple. Remember that the purpose of your copy
is to sell, not to help your designer win a design award. Keep
the number of typefaces, point sizes and weights, methods of
emphasis (bold, underline, italic, contrasting colors), picture
treatments, and general design techniques to a minimum.

In practice

• Make sure your designer works to the same brief you have,

provided the very first line says, “Purpose of piece: to sell XXX.”

• Horses for courses. If you’re writing landing pages or blast

emails, make sure your designer is an online specialist.
Equally, for direct mail, make sure they know how to put a
mailpack together.

100 GREAT COPYWRITING IDEAS • 189