The notion that less is more is one of the oldest arguments in advertising. It’s almost
laughable that anyone would argue with the aesthetic of a clean, simple message. After
all, Bill Bernbach won that argument once and for all 40 years ago with all those classic
VW ads. DDB launched a new school of advertising. My generation was inspired to get
into the business as art became a partner to commerce. The thinking went along the
lines that if we were going to intrude on people’s entertainment, why not be interesting
and engaging about.

We’ve obviously lost our way. Print advertising is harder to read than it ever was thanks
to image manipulation software and the ability to layer type and tone. With longer
commercial breaks, higher costs and shorter spots, TV has gotten much worse, too.
And thanks to technology, designers can digitize the clutter and put it on-line in a
comprehension defying jumble. Welcome to new media.

It might be a good time to put the design monster back in its cage.

Clean communications is largely the result of the Bauhaus movement, the invention of
Helvetica type and the insights of advertising design pioneers in the 60s like Helmut
Krone.

In a brilliant 2007 documentary called HELVETICA, director Gary Hustwit chronicles
how this type innovation swept corporate logos, signage, collateral information and all
forms of mass communication. This movement coincided with the Golden Age of
advertising in the 60s and 70s. Helvetica type cleaned up all forms of mass
communication.

This film comes along at a good time. Between technology and a grunge movement in
the 90s advertising design lost its way. We can blame media costs for pushing clients to
want to pack more information into their advertising, but media costs have always been
too high. If anything, with a fragmented audience, we should be leaner and simpler with
our message anyway.

This argument is further supported by another timely re-visit to the white space
argument. In a 2006 article in the Journal of Consumer Research, academics John W.
Pracejus, G. Douglas Olsen and Thomas C. O’Guinn prove the value of negative pace
in an article entitled, “How Nothing Became Something: White Space Rhetoric, History,
and Meaning”

I’ll save you the details, consumers perceive messages with greater white space to
come from brands that are leaders. They perceive higher quality, prestige, trust, and
less risk when the only variable is the amount of white space itself. The executive
summary of this research: say less, you’ll get more out of it.