THE MAKING
OF THE FOOLPROOF
NEWSPAPER DRAWING
SOME ADVERTISING PICTURES PRINT WELL—OTHERS DO NOT. WHY? IT’S ALL A MATTER OF GOING ABOUT IT IN A KNOW-HOW WAY
By J. LIVINGSTON LARNED
An advertiser— perhaps one of the largest users of newspaper space in the country—sprang a surprise recently on his ad-manager. Into the office he came, one day, grim-visaged, jaw set, fire in his eyes, and armed with no less than fifty clippings from exchanges.
And on the amazed ad-manager’s desk he placed two conglomerate piles of advertising matter. One represented the national newspaper campaign of his own industry; the other a collection of newspaper advertisements, picked at random.
“I think I have conclusive proof,” said he, in no mild mood, “that you fellows are not as efficient as you might be. Here are our advertisements—from papers everywhere. The illustrations print abominably! Look at them. The matter has been called to my attention many times—by the newspapers themselves, by our road representatives and by local dealers. They say our electro service and our straight national campaigns are all muddied up with pictures that nobody can decipher. Here’s conclusive proof of it. Not a clean-looking cut in the series and you can’t blame it on paper and press work and all that—they’re all bad!”
The advertising manager glanced casually at the exhibits. The criticism was valid. Here was a daily newspaper campaign, running into space valued at approximately sixty thousand dollars, and the displays, three-fourths illustration, were mussy, involved, smeared up, and unsatisfactory from a reproductive standpoint. Solid black backgrounds were a sickly, washed-out gray and in other places intricate pen work had “run-together.”
It was equally true that clippings of competitive advertising and advertising in general, selected at random, were strangely clean-cut. The comparison was startling.
“Mr. X,” finally observed the ad-manager, “I see what you mean; all of us in this department have known of it, kept track of it; and the remarkable part of the entire situation is that these results can be traced back to you and your personal insistence on a certain type of pen and ink design, executed in a specific technique. These matters came up for your supervision and O. K. You did not care for the bold, simple outline drawings first submitted. You preferred too many, and a glut of detail. All of which is not compatible with newspaper printing, even in large space. We were afraid of this and said so at the time. Our objection was overruled. It’s one thing to prefer a pleasing, perhaps highly artistic pen technique and quite another to apply it to fast presses, poor ink and hurried make-ready. A great many things can happen, and do happen, to a newspaper design before it is printed and in the readers’ hands.”