Friday 20 April 2012

Turning Intelligence Into Magic; A Very Quick Review.



Although the content of 'Hegarty on Advertising; Turning Intelligence into Magic' was full of insightful analysis and powerful advice, strung together by great story telling (for that kind of review click here), I was most struck by the presentation of this book. Rather than pick a font, size and page template, Hegarty considered each page in it's own right.


Every double page spread in this book could be a poster in it’s own right. The compositions are beautiful and range from intricate to minimalist.



As I continued to read, I noticed that the varying font sizes, placements, underlining etc. were not purely aesthetic but adhered to a pattern of visual communication.

Without describing the entire book, examples of what I mean by this are;

1. The centred and ‘normal’ (not italicised, not underlined, 12pt font etc.) text makes up what you could describe as the main prose of the book. 

2. Within that you have some bold text separated from the main text by || which brings that body of prose to a conclusion.

3. There are also some bits of text to the left of the page in bold and in a larger font which are making what you might call ‘the big point’. 


And there's plently more where that came from. So why do I like this so much? Is it just because the pages look pretty? Partly yes, but also because as you read the book you get used to this pattern of communication and respond much more strongly to what is being written. || The content is curated for you.



There are countless books about creativity but this is the first one I have seen that takes it’s own advice and actually is creative.

PS. If you have any thoughts on the Hegarty-esque layout of this blog post or otherwise get in touch!

No comments:

Post a Comment