One of the things I am tasked with at work is the creation of sell sheets to be used as part of presentations of new products. If you are familiar with the term "sell sheet" you probably wouldn't recognize what we call a sell sheet. What we, and by we I mean me, produce is essentially a full page ad to be inserted in a PowerPoint presentation.

This year - for the 2010 new products - there were a total of 21 sell sheets. A few of them were updates of earlier sheets for minor product refreshes, leaving me with 17 to create form scratch. I sent five of them out to outside resources who do amazing work, cutting my load down to 12. It is expected that I show my internal customers 3 concepts for each.

Did I mention I had less than two weeks to get this done?

I dove in and set an aggressive schedule of completing round 1 for 3 products - 9 concepts - a day.

At one point on the third day, when I was presenting concepts and receiving feedback on the previous days' work someone from marketing asked a very astute question.

"Why are all of these in the same typeface?"

I had indeed set the type in all 27 concepts produced at that point in Helvetica. I had done so for three reasons.

One, I had to generate and layout a lot of concepts in a very short period of time. I really wasn't going to spend hours I didn't having exploring the thousands of fonts available to me to find just the right one.

Two, more often than not after spending the time searching for just the right font to enhance the layout and the copy someone from marketing will comment "I like concept A but I like the font on B better. Can we see one with that using the headline from C?" At which point the designer dies a little inside from the effort at self restraint required to not leap across the table and take the fool by the throat and thrown them to the floor.

The third is a bit more esoteric and less violent.

There is considerable debate among designers and typographers about how type should be used. Should type be used expressively to enhance the copy or should the type be neutral and let the copy stand on its own.

I tend to go both ways on the issue. For first round concepts I always use neutral type. If the concept can't stand on its own in Helvetica or Garamond then more expressive type isn't going to make it more effective.  If a concept is successful without undue typographic embellishment, then it's worth enhancing.

All the sell sheets were done - on time.The selected concepts were finalized with appropriate typography. No one suffered any bodily harm.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 06:45 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment