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Layout

Picture, Headline, Copy

·6 min in full, in the book·PagePerfect Journal

Also available as a typeset book

Put the picture at the top, the headline under it and the copy under the headline. Design writing has repeated that order for 40 years, usually with the word tested somewhere nearby. Behind it there is one page of a book published in 1983, and one average whose source is not given.1

The rest of this essay is in the book

It goes on to cover:

  • What the 1983 book says
  • The picture wins attention, whatever its size
  • What a Starch score records
  • Müller-Brockmann’s fields
  • What Tinker measured about leading
  • Joining the two is our idea
  • Give way to the measure

About the book

Notes

  1. Ogilvy 1983, ch. 7, p. 88 (the looking order and the habit argument); about p. 90 (the editorial conventions); Ogilvy, Benson & Mather 1958, Whole page: three columns under a full-width photograph, closing with a price and a dealer’s address. A practitioner’s recommendation in a trade book, which is why this is graded as practice. Phrase searches of chapter 7 returned no passage about testing thousands of advertisements, no logo placement and no comparison with copy wrapped around a picture; only parts of pages 70 to 103 were legible, so those are negative results rather than proof of absence. Evidence C: professional practice or tradition.

Sources

  • Ogilvy, D. (1983). Ogilvy on Advertising. New York: Crown. Also checked in the 1985 Vintage reprint (index page numbers identical). openlibrary.org
  • Ogilvy, Benson & Mather for Rolls-Royce Inc. (1958). "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise..." [advertisement]. Full-page reproduction hosted by Enchanting Marketing (2021). enchantingmarketing.com

Further reading