Spread the word like Sagmeister & Walsh
For a show at the contemporary art gallery Deitch Projects in 2008, designer Stefan Sagmeister stacked 10,000 bananas against a wall. Unripe green bananas among the yellow ones spelled out the sentence, “Self-confidence produces fine results.”
Sagmeister has also created ad campaigns and album covers for organizations like HBO, Levi’s, the Rolling Stones and the Talking Heads.
‘Six Things I’ve Learned In My Life So Far’
I learned of Sagmeister and his partner Jessica Walsh at “Six Things,” a new show at The Jewish Museum in New York. In five videos and a sound-activated sculpture, the designers illustrate six beliefs Sagmeister has developed by keeping a diary:
- If I Don’t Ask I Won’t Get
- Keeping a Diary Supports Personal Development
- Be More Flexible
- It Is Pretty Much Impossible to Please Everybody
- Now Is Better
- Feel Others Feel
The design duo spells out these phrases using sugar cubes, bubbles, water balloons and other surprising elements.
I found the exhibit and Sagmeister’s book Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far to be great sources of inspiration on typography. And watch for Sagmeister’s The Happy Show, a traveling exhibition, and The Happy Film, Sagmeister’s upcoming documentary.
How can you use surprising elements for your display copy?
Get to the point faster
Because web visitors spend 80% of their time above the fold
Consider the numbers:
- Web visitors spend 80% of the time above the fold, or on the first screen of a webpage, and just 20% below the fold.
- Material near the top of a webpage gets 17x the attention of that near the bottom.
- The average difference in how users treat information above vs. below the fold is 84%.
But where’s the fold? Content that shows up above the fold on a 30-inch monitor can take as many as five screens on a smartphone.
Reach readers where their eyes are.
So how can you reach your readers where their eyes are?
At Writing for the Web and Mobile — our two-day hands-on web-writing master class on June 12-13 in Chicago — you’ll learn how to:
- Pass the 1-2-3-4 test to put your message where web visitors' eyes are. Tip: Try this simple test on your smartphone for best results.
- Make it a mullet — and 4 more steps for writing effective web heads. (No. 5 is the most important thing you can do to improve the ROI of your site.)
- Optimize webpages for Google and humans with our three-part test. Note: If you're still using SEO tricks you learned in the 'oughts, Google may be penalizing your pages.
- Don't drop the deck. Learn to make the most of the best-read element on your webpage.
- Steal headline-writing tips from the BBC — the source of the best news heads on the web, according to Nielsen.
Learn more about our
Chicago master class.
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