Don’t be boring
“Don’t mistake legibility for communication. Just because something’s legible doesn’t mean it communicates. More importantly, it doesn’t mean it communicates the right thing. So, what is the message sent before somebody actually gets into the material? I think that’s sometimes an overlooked area.”
— David Carson
Why is this important?
According to Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman, 95% of our purchase decisions take place subconsciously.
These subconscious decisions are based on a deeply empirical mental processing system that follows a logic of its own.
Our subconscious decision to buy is then communicated to the conscious mind via an emotion. The conscious mind then searches for rational reasons to buy.
In other words, we justify our emotional signals to buy with logical reasons.
However, when most of us seek to persuade, we sell almost exclusively to the rational, conscious mind.
When done properly, images, typography, and layout can generate a lot of emotion. That’s something to think about when you’re doing you’re next sales presentation. Or re-designing your website.
More about David Carson
David Carson’s boundary-breaking typography in the 1990s, in Ray Gun magazine and other pop-cult books, ushered in a new vision of type and page design — quite simply, breaking the traditional mold of type on a page and demanding fresh eyes from the reader.
Squishing, smashing, slanting and enchanting the words on a layout, Carson made the point, over and over, that letters on a page are art. You can see the repercussions of his work to this day, on a million Flash intro pages (and probably just as many skateboards and T-shirts).
His first book, with Lewis Blackwell and a foreword by David Byrne, is The End of Print, and he’s written or collaborated on several others, including the magisterial Book of Probes, an exploration of the thinking of Marshall McLuhan. His latest book is Trek, a collection of his recent work.
