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Lettering in ADVERTISING "PART-1"

BY FREDERICK A. HORN

This section of Modern Lettering and Calligraphy is bound to be, I feel, an I uneasy bedfellow. It is as if an uncouth, rough-voiced huckster, benighted at an inn, were permitted to share the same quarters as some elegant, lettered gentle­men travelling for pleasure, his sweat-stained garments disposed ill amongst their laces and furbelows, and his insistent, forceful talk of the market-place jarring against their well-bred discourse on the intellectual delights of the fashionable world.

Nor only in his clothes and conversation does this man of commerce fill his com­panions with restless inquietude; for indeed, as his way of life is more uncouth and earthy than theirs, so his very philosophy is modelled on expediency; where the standards of scholars allow of an absolute good, the standards of the huckster permit but a relative good, and what gentlemen may dote upon as a work of art, stands saluted by him with hard language if it does not serve to move his unguents and nostrums from his shelves to the pockets of his audience.

For the fundamental and essentially necessary purpose of art used in the service of commerce, is to sell goods and services. This is a truism which needs continual repeti­tion, since it is continually ignored by critics of advertising, and particularly by those critics who, by occupation or inclination, have an interest in art. Just as it demands a disciplined mind to make a considered aesthetic judgment on a painting, ignoring the red-herrings of personal inclination and subject-matter, so does a piece of adver­tising demand a disciplined mind in order that an unbiased judgment as advertising be made upon it, apart from purely aesthetic considerations.

We are all, to some degree, creatures of our inclinations; and those of us who are artists and designers especially so, since by long training to acquire the disciplined mind in its aesthetic sense, we are better able to obtain the direct response from any work of art put before us, the better since we wish to do so; and it is precisely this capacity and inclination to assess aesthetically, which clouds our judgment of advertising unless we be continually on our guard against letting it do so. In the nine teen-twenties, when all the world was young, there was one ingeniously worded phrase, coined in an age when enlightened clients were beginning to use the best design obtainable then, when Hobson was performing miracles in Manchester, when C. Lovat Fraser was working for Heal's and Kauffer for London Transport; this phrase (to which we clung rather as, in the seaside boarding house, the young lady is depicted as clinging to the Rock of Ages), this talisman and touchstone by which all work and all success were judged, was "Good art is good business".

And, of course, how true it was, then, when so much of advertising design was disgustingly bad, and good art, by contrast, shone like a candle in a naughty world. Alas, good art is not necessarily good business today; good advertising alone is good business, and no art used in advertising is good unless the advertising of which it forms a part is effective as a selling medium. Advertising can be bad art; it can even be bad taste; but if it sells the goods or services it is intended to sell, it is good ad­vertising. This is a pill which every artist engaged in advertising must swallow, if he is to take his fees with a clear conscience; and it is a pill which most employed designers in advertising agencies have managed to get down; yet many of the free­lances shy at it yet, be it ever so sugar-coated. So much so, in fact, that every art director has had the experience, not once, but many times, after attending policy meetings and hammering out a sound visual approach to the problem, of carefully briefing a selected free-lance designer, only to have him return a week later with a piece of work entirely at variance with the briefing, accompanied by the remark: "Old man, really, I didn't quite see it that way; this looks much livelier."

And, of course, it often does. The only snag is that the better piece of work aesthetically is quite useless functionally, and, meantime, press dates loom nearer and the artwork which will work is still to be done. Too often the free-lance looks upon the art director as a deadly dull sort of fellow who "plays safe"; in fact, his response to good art is as thrilling and enthusiastic as even its producer could wish; however, he is not a patron, but an advertising man, and his criterion must be, not "Does it move me?" but "Will it move the goods?"

It is, then, our duty to apply this test, "Will it move the goods?" to all lettering, type or "hand-drawn", used in advertising, if we are to arrive at a true and valid estimate of its value as part of an advertisement. Such a test is rendered the more difficult of application in that results of any such advertising, in terms of sales figures, are not easily available, and are often, indeed, closely guarded secrets locked in the bosoms of agency and client; consequently, it becomes necessary to perform the protean evolution which, successfully or not, is a perpetual activity of the advertising man; it is necessary to put oneself into the skin, and think with the mind, of the type of person to whom the advertising is addressed, and endeavour, from that stand­point, to feel whether the advertisement really works or not.

It may well be argued that the lettering in any piece of publicity, unless it be purely wording throughout, is, from the standpoint of psychological approach, of minor importance compared with copy and picture, and that therefore, even though the other elements in the advertisement may deliberately be modified aesthetically in order to meet the demands of product and public appeal, only the most beautiful letter-forms should be the rule, both from the standpoint of aesthetics and of "improving" the general level of the advertisement.

The fallacy in this argument is two-fold. The wording, and particularly the heading and product-name, are of paramount importance in any piece of publicity, which is not a well-loved and equally well-known classic to be re-decorated, nor an edition-de-luxe to be treasured on a collector's shelves, but an urgent message to be implanted in the mind of the prospect, in approximately five seconds (or ten, if you are lucky enough to hold him so long with your various technical skills) when he is thinking of other things, and not wanting to read your advertising anyway. All the arts of designer, letterer and typographer are bent towards this prime purpose; communication is the essential function of all lettering in advertising, and decoration and "atmosphere" are subsidiary. To a man with a headache, a superb piece of calligraphy is just another headache; but heavy block letters that tell him instantly how to cure his pain quickly for sixpence do a better job, however much we may deplore their ugliness.

It is, therefore, imperative that all lettering for advertising should satisfy this neces­sity for communication with the least possible interference due to aesthetic considera­tions ; this is not to say, of course, that all such lettering should have a utilitarian monotony; the type of product advertised, the medium to be used (poster, press, print), the position it will occupy when it meets the reader's eye (newspapers, hoardings, escalators, the morning mail), and the type of reader to whom the advertising is directed, all have a qualifying effect on the selection of the appropriate letter-forms for the work. For a quality product costing hundreds of pounds, appealing to a comparatively small section of the public, less regard to immediate legibility and more regard to purely aesthetic considerations is permissible, than would be the case with a cheap product for mass sale; but only, be it noted, because in the case of the quality product, aesthetic appeal is an integral part of the sales appeal, and never because of its desirability apart from its advertising context.

In the field of press advertising, "hand-lettering" for the reasons of practicability, economics and suitability, takes second place to type. The days when a line or two of lettering were used to add " distinctiveness" to an advertisement are gone, except in those cases where a certain kind of drawn letter can give an effect of atmosphere unobtainable by any of the display faces now available in the typesetters' cases. It is tenable, I think, that the type-designer, with his technical allies and the fuller time at his disposal, can produce, for most practical newsprint purposes, a better designed and cleaner looking job than the letterer, with his usually hurried work suffering from equally hurried block-making, can do. It is in the fields of packaging and print that the first-class lettering man is better able to show his paces, since the design-qualities of well-drawn letter forms can give dignity and prestige to packs; and booklets and brochures, demanding and receiving a more leisured inspection than press advertisements, offer better opportunities for the use of letters selected for then-aesthetic as well as informative value. Apart from entirely lettered or calligraphic subjects, posters fall into a rather special category, since most poster designers use their lettering so much as part of the complete design, and the style of letter is so much conditioned by the manner of the poster-designer, that any consideration of the forms must be qualified by these factors; indeed, even very bad lettering can become tolerable if it "grows" from the natural style of the poster-designer in this way; Toulouse-Lautrec was no stickler for classicism in this connection!

The very real danger for the future good of lettering as an art, when practised for the needs of advertising, lies, I feel, in the fact, indisputable to those whose business it is to buy artwork, that many of those who profess to be letterers (or, should I say, calligraphers, since the former title has come to have an unfortunate connotation of "hack", and appears to be avoided in preference for a word smacking more of culture) build the whole of their knowledge and technical equipment on the fashionable and legitimate derivations of better men, without ever taking the trouble to go back to first principles. Such people are writing in sand, since the next tide of tricks obliterates their apeish alphabets, and their hands must begin anew to imitate what their minds have never apprehended. The disturbing aspect of this kind of thing is that technical virtuosity, "finish", appears to be the only criterion by which they judge the work of other letterers and of themselves, and there seems to be no awareness, nor desire for awareness, of the treasures of the past. Even the hand­writing of some self-styled letterers would be the disgrace of a sixth-former, and if a man is not sensitive enough to be repelled by his own bad writing, how may he be expected to be sensitive in his work for clients ? One may buy dry-brush script at any stall, but ask any but the knowledgeable few for a line or two of sweet roman to run softly down a page, and the answer you will have is a dusty one indeed.

Nor is it only among the incompetent gentry that history appears to be lettered in vain; for, since the work of the letterer must be married to that of the typographer, it would seem to be axiomatic that some knowledge of the sister-craft would be essential to the letterer who works for advertising; yet, it appears to me, that for even the good letterer, this necessary historical background of advertising typo­graphy is as much a matter for indifference as the song the sirens sang.

For there is a history of advertising typography, not perhaps with the great tradi­tions of books and manuscripts, not leading back through the centuries to a mighty Bible and a column to commemorate the victories of a Roman Emperor, but with its modest beginnings in handbills advertising good Conveniencies for Sweating, Bathing, Shaving and Cupping after the best Manner, and Maudlin the Merchant's Daughter at the New Play-House in Mayfair; with quietly set newspaper advertise­ments for sailings, decorated with charming woodcuts of the vessels, or announce­ments of the loss of negro servants answering to the name of Tom. These were the comparatively dignified precursors of the early-nineteenth-century advertisements studded with the heavy blacks of Robert

Thorne's Fat Face and Egyptian, the van­guard of a host of attention-getters in type, the heralds of a new era of business prosperity; their names, as odd as their origins, echo the Victorian era—Roman open, Grotesque Inline, Reversed Egyptian, Ornamental No. 2, Rustic, Mikado—a period in print.

These "monstrosities of fashion", as contemporary critics called them, arc the fathers of our display advertising of today, and need to be known to letterers in their place and period, not in the imitations of imitations in the letterer's reference file. Similarly, the aesthetic revival of the early nineteen-twenties, the influence of the German designers on display settings later in the same decade, Jan Tschichold's Die Neue Typographic of 1928, the advent of the clinical school of setting, and the Victorian revival of 1934, these are essential knowledge for the advertising letterer who is to reflect truly and significantly the spirit of his own time.

And despite the advance of printing techniques in recent years, despite the very real menace to aesthetic qualities of lettering inherent in the possibilities of wide­spread adoption of machines for photo-mechanical composition, threatening mechanical calculation of letter-widths, blurred reproduction, misty inking, and the ultimate nightmare of the typist replacing the letterer, there are still really only four main groups, apart from classic forms, in which the commercial letterer may use his talents and earning capacity to equal advantage: sans-serif, egyptian, heavy roman and script styles.

Simplicity is the chief characteristic of sans-serif; all "decoration" and most of the sparkle of weight variation in the strokes are sacrificed to the purely utilitarian aspects of legibility and anonymity. There is no sentiment in sans; it is immensely accommodating, looks well on almost any paper, and as far as glance reading is concerned is the soundest medium for conveyance of advertising messages. Egyptian, the early nineteenth-century innovation, was treated with disdain by twentieth-century purists, and sank into oblivion until post-1918 German type designers re­discovered its possibilities in the field of commercial print. Its revival was mainly due to a local progression from sans-serif styles, giving clarity without the starkness of the sans letter, plus a certain sparkle and power in heavier weights. It has just that machine-like character, combined with a definite personality of its own, which lends itself for use with the modern commercial designer's repertoire, photograph, photogram, photomontage and aerograph. In designing for the heavy industries, egyptian is the obvious choice, but its usefulness is not exhausted here; used judi­ciously, even the heavier versions can add a new aspect to publicity with a lighter touch.

The group of heavy roman styles is a rather looser classification than the two pre­ceding, since, though originally derived from traditional book faces of roman character, the variations of weight of downstroke, type of serif and "set" produce letter-forms as far apart as the aims of Thorne and Reiner; but speaking generally, heavy roman styles give the letterer the opportunity of obtaining, in the display of his message, two qualities which are apparently paradoxical, strength and refine­ment. Refinement is a word which has come to have unfortunate associations, but it does express that combination of good breeding and elegance which is one of the salient features of a well-designed bold roman letter. These letters are town-criers with the honeyed speech of B.B.C. announcers.

Scripts are, of course, no novelty. As far back as the sixteenth century, types were evolved which reproduced as closely as possible the characteristics of the fashionable handwriting of the period. These types, a less formal version of italic, were used by many printers in the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries, but naturally in bookwork only. It is not until the dawn of the nineteenth century that we find scripts ministering to the needs of commercial printing, when Fry, in 1795, and Thorne, in 1803, showed versions of the script which was known as "English". From these small beginnings have stemmed the vast spate of scripts we see today. Much modern script for advertising is considered to be indelicate and vulgar. It has a familiar, almost too familiar, back-slapping " What'll you have?" sort of look, from which the aesthete shrinks in horror. But used intelligently, with due regard for fitness and pattern on the page, script can be as sound from the aesthetic as from the selling aspect. Facts, statistics, reasoned arguments, have their place in advertising—but so have catch-phrases, slogans, puns and jests, and for these, with their intimate, man-to-man appeal, script can put it over. There is something about a word or two in script that one cannot get away from: racy and yet decisive, strident and yet compelling, it forces the unwilling reader to grasp its message.

Parallel with the wide use of what might be termed "conventional" scripts, we have had a remarkable development in freely-drawn forms with a calligraphic influence, graphic arabesques which, with their exciting and eye-catching pattern, draw one's attention to the message they have to give. They are essentially pictures of writing, and, logically, because handwriting is a personal thing, advertising messages dressed in this form have the faculty of speaking familiarly to the reader in a way that letter-forms of better breeding cannot bring themselves to do; these variations on handwriting themes are the nearest approach to the spoken word that advertising in print has achieved.

There is one further direction in which lettering for advertising has moved of recent years, which calls for comment. With the wider use of photo-offset and photogravure processes, and their possibilities for facsimile reproduction of subtle tone treatments, letterers and art directors, in their restless search for the new, have been able to play tricks with letter-forms undreamed of thirty years ago. Letters built from bent wire, cut out in wood and photographed, made of ribbon or wool, chalked on walls or blackboards, inscribed in sand, written with an aerograph, scratched on glass, all these and more have been used to catch the eye and pinpoint the atmosphere of an advertisement. Certain of these devices have a very real power of suggestion, and we must be a little cautious in our condemnation of them, since they do function in an advertising sense; the only consolation that the purist can have (and it is a great one) is that the frenetic clamour of these performers, against the occasional flawless beauty of a classic letter form, is as the buzzing of gnats in the ear of Buddha.

To sum up, then, lettering used for an advertising purpose must be considered subjectively and not objectively; the aesthetic values of the letter-forms used are a secondary consideration, since only in an advertising context can their qualities be assessed correctly. The message must be communicated to the reader with the maximum of emphasis and the minimum of fuss, conditional upon the medium used and the product advertised; but it is possible, and desirable, to be bold without being bloody, and forceful without being foul; and since the job of the "commercial" letterer is to play his part in a team that produces efficient advertising, and therefore to consider, not only the beauty of his flourishes, but the beauty of sales-curves too, he must, of necessity, learn to bang his big drum when the occasion arises.

But having learnt this, he must still, and perpetually, return to the classic forms for his relief and his inspiration, and not relax his efforts to reconcile business and beauty; in such case he may marry his work and his ideals; we are all on our way to Heaven, and Goudy, Gill and Koch are of the company.

And, though, at times he may groan, as he must, at the exigencies of commercial work, there is one thing he should know for the lifting of his spirit. The visual aspect of any advertising is, despite its commercial demands, by necessity conditioned by the attitude of mind of the artist who is responsible for designing it. If he can possibly design for the use of superb lettering, he does so; there are many more bitter battles fought between art directors and clients over the subtleties of a serif than the letterer wots of, and the former is more alive to the functional possibilities of good letter-form than is the letterer himself. The free-lance who feels he is fighting a lone battle for beauty may take heart; the art director is his ally, and his Trojan horse.

SOCKS UNDERWEAR KNITWEAR SHIRTSGLOVES SWIMWEAR

Lettering from the Twentieth-Century Fox film used in publicity by Colman, Prentis & Varley Ltd.

STOCKINGS UNDERWEAR KNITWEAR CLOVES BLOUSES SWIMWEAR

Robert chubb. Press advertisement for I. & R. Morley Ltd. Advertising Agents: F. C. Pritchard Wood & Partners Ltd. Right: Allan carter. Press advertisement for Moussec Ltd. Advertising Agents: Service Advertising Co. Ltd.

There is a size for every occasion (bottles 18/6, half-bottles 9/9) and of course there is always a baby Moussec — the one-glass size — at 2/6 in all bars.

k. c. chapman. Poster for London Transport Executive

david sisman, Colmatt Prentis & Varley Studios. Folder for British European Airways. Original in red and white on cream paper

Opposite: manfred reiss. Poster for The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents

Hubert and grete troost. Trademarks for Farben-fabriken Bayer and [below) for Kerzen- und Seifenfabrik Milly

There's only one thing that can keep this new breed of vanishing Americans from vanishing when your commercials come on ... creative ingenuity.

YOUNG & RUBICAM, INC.

ADVERTISING

New York Chicago Detroit San Francisco Hollywood Montreal Toronto Mexico City London*

FORTUNE April 1953 161

sam marsh, Young & Rubiam Inc. Art Director: Jack Anthony. Magazine Advertisement

james bos well. Folder for Ealing Studios Ltd. Advertising Director: S. John Woods. Original in green and white

ALFREDO   VENTURA. Headline from Lux Film folder. an director: Augusto Favalli

Left: peter sachs. Poster for Associated British Film Distributors Ltd. Advertising Director: S. John Woods

James Boswll. Folder for Eating Studios Ltd. Advertising Director: S.John Woods

AD-LET STUDIOS. Press advertisement letter­ing for Mentasol (Pepsodent Sales Ltd.) Advertising Agents: J. Walter Thompson Company

BUY IT FROM MAC FISHERIES

Branches throughout Bristol and Somerset

hans schleger (zero). Press advertisement  for Mac Fisheries Ltd. Advertising Agents: Mather & Crowther Ltd.

HORACE PAUL. N. W. Ayer & Son Inc. Magazine advertisement for Yardley & Co. Ltd.

hans tisdall. Press advertisement (same lettering used on a book-jacket) for The Cresset Press Ltd.

Right: r. jenkins, Cecil D. Notley Adver­tising Ltd. Magazine advertisement for Wolsey Ltd.

ashley havinden, W. S. Crawford Ltd. Double-page spread for J. & S. Bickler Ltd.

Above and right: sam konowitz, Hirshon-Garfield Inc. Head­line and complete advertisement for The American Viscose Cor­poration

Robert chubb, Young & Rubican Ltd. Press advertisement lettering for Mars Ltd.

Ashley havinden, W. S. Crawford Ltd. Poster forLiberty & Co. Ltd.

milton crown. "Crown Jewel" Script

m. m. davison. "Davison Victorian Script"

M. M. davison. "Davison Spencerian"

TOMMY THOMPSON. "Thompson Scribe" Above four specimens courtesy: Photo-Lettering Inc.

RELIEF DRUCK A.G.

Lettering from a magazine advertisement for Jacob Rohner Ltd.

Magazine advertisement for Schwitter A.G.

hans borvelink. Folder cover for N.V. Lettergieterij "Amsterdam”voorheen .N. Tetterode

croome & laker  ltd. Lettering for Clark Son & Morland. Designer: Eric Hobbs, S. H. Benson Ltd.

HERMANN BENTELE. Trademark for G. J. Schober  G.m.b.H.

H. W. BITTNLR. Trademark for Fränkisches Metallwerk m.b.H.

STUDIO N.P.F. Folder for Tandtechnisch Laboratorium J. & P. Siesling

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