ArticlesLet me try another magic trick on you.
Please go grab the nearest popular magazine or newspaper.
Flick through it until you find an advertisement for a watch.
Look at the time that the watch is showing.
Concentrate on the time.
Concentrate harder. Focus on the time.
I am starting to feel it. It’s starting to coming through. I am getting an image of the number ten.
Concentrate more. It’s very strong.
Definitely ten, repeatedly.
Is the time on the watch ten past ten?
Give it a try. It’s a fun trick, but it almost never works for me. It always seems that the mark that I am trying the trick on either (a) chooses a magazines with no adverts for watches, (b) already knows the secret, or (c) finds one of the few adverts that don’t conform.
The secret is that there is a convention that watches in adverts are set to ten past ten. (If you haven’t heard of this convention before, your first reaction is probably of disbelief. Check it out for yourself.)
Why is there this convention? Over the past 20 or so years I have heard a few explanations. The most common claim is that it looks like a smile (“a happy face”), but I favour the claim that it is to prevent the hands from obscuring the brand name, which is typically directly below the center of the watch face.
What bemuses me about this is that it is probably the tip of the iceberg. There’s probably thousands of these bizarre little conventions being followed every day, surrounding us unnoticed.
I am not particularly a font geek. (“There, but for the grace of God, go I.”) If I was, I would have appreciated much earlier how strong “typographic allusion” can be – the way a font choice can conveying extra meaning beyond the mere words it is representing.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) has a distinctive font in its logo – the orange-to-yellow fade from top to bottom, the wedge shape, the black shadow. (The marketing department have re-jiggered the original to read “Indiana Jones” now that the Indiana Jones franchise is bigger than the Raiders one.)
That particular logo style has since become synonymous with adventure. I’ve lost count of the number of adverts (especially in the mid-eighties) that have used the same orange-to-yellow, wedge-shape with black shadow to give the impression that their product is associated with rollicking adventures. There’s even a look-alike True-Type font called, naturally enough, Adventure.
I was also impressed by a toothpaste advert which used a light-blue-and-white fade instead of orange-and-yellow, to convey both a sense of adventure and a minty fresh taste!
The Raiders look is just another example of a convention quietly used by adverts that surround us every day, and yet goes by generally unnoticed.
Weird.
Comment by Alastair on March 28, 2006
Design patterns for advertising?
I always notice the rule of pictures of cars: the spokes of the wheels are all perfectly in alignment with each other, and if the wheels have a logo, it is always the correct alignment with respect to the ground.