The appearance of large areas of black may be secured via subterfuge. One method is to form the background of heavy black lines, quite close together. The white spaces between save the printing. Look at straight type through a magnifying glass. Not even type is printed clear black. Then what chance would an even surface of large proportion have?
Newspaper cuts should be “routed deep.” Routing is merely the deepening or entire cutting away of extraneous matter on the engraving—that is, where there is no printing surface. The smudges of hideous design often seen are really an impression of a metal surface that has not been routed out properly. Every engraving should be examined critically for such defects.
Avoid placing a shaded area against a black area. As we have intimated, the heart and soul of the successful newspaper drawing is contrast.
The beginning of every advertisement or series of advertisements is represented in terms of a first visualization. It is in pencil. These should be made same size—that is, the actual size they are to eventually appear. Then no one, the artist least of all, is fooled by disparity of proportions.
KEEP IT SIMPLE
The visualizer should keep one cardinal point in mind. Keep newspaper advertisements simple. The less there is in them the better. Thirty-two of the ads selected by our advertising friend, mentioned earlier in the story, were good because they were simple. Type was held to blocks, and with as little change in style, size and character of type as possible. All of them were characterized by liberal white margins. It is the best known way of fighting back the opposition of the surrounding appeals on the same page.
There’s a good test possible. Make a photographic print of your advertisement, the size it is to appear, and paste it on a newspaper page—not a New York or Chicago paper, but a page in the “Bingville Banner.”
Before plates are made or even before pen and ink drawings are fully completed, you can change, rearrange, eliminate, or add to, as the case may be.
The wise advertiser is the one who in preparing an elaborate and extensive newspaper campaign keys it in its printing qualities, not to the best papers on the list, but to the ones that are worst printed. This may mean the undreamed of thing of 100 per cent perfect!
No advertiser can hope to secure full efficiency from a campaign if it presents a smudged and confused appearance. Newspapers are trig things in their own right. Their column rules and their precision of type make this an arbitrary condition. There is really nothing finer and cleaner and more pleasing to the human eye than a well-composed newspaper, hot from the press. Ugly advertisements can make an ugly newspaper. They can even spoil the set-up and typography in general of the reading sections.