“The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul.”
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
“The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul.”
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
As any consultant will confirm, agencies come with a certain future-looking expectation. We’re the experts, and we should be able to predict what’s next. When yet another decade comes to an end, we’re all called upon to look at the last 10 years to predict the next 10.
Up until the late 2010s, it was a nearly country-wide shared experience to seek information on a government website (federal or state) and suddenly find yourself back in 1997. On the web, the colors were loud, the information was crowded, the navigation was almost nonexistent and actual answers were elusive.
“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Damn, F. Scott; that’s cold. We were just trying to express our excitement. The most enthusiastic of the punctuation options, the exclamation point has gotten a bad rap among, well, seemingly everyone. But was it always this way? Or did the internet kill the exclamation point and Fitzgerald’s disgust was simply ahead of its time?
So, you’re thinking about how to reach a non-English-speaking audience with your marketing. That’s great! But — and we hope we’re not the first to tell you this — you can’t just plug into a translation service, and declare your work done.
Designers and editors, this vocab lesson is dedicated to you and your pursuit of elevated typography. You already know what all of these terms mean, but the clients or account managers you work with may not. So we’ve presented an easy guide that helps get everyone on the same page (and text on the same line).
You may be thinking, “This is a highly specific topic. How could there be a rabbit hole to this?” And we’re here to tell you, we originally didn’t think there was a lot of material to mine here. But as we started wading around in the subject line pool, we soon discovered how wrong we were. So let’s dive right in!
If you’ve ever worked with Look Listen on an email campaign, you’ve noticed a line of copy in our documents titled “PHT” or “preheader text.” Maybe you know what function it serves. Maybe you even know some of its history. But after this, you’ll know it all. Because we went on a fact-finding spiral about this mysterious preheader text, and would like to share it with you.
Perhaps you’ve never thought about disclosure marks or registered trademark symbols. You’re exactly like a former version of us, blissfully unaware of all the placements, restrictions, and general nuances that go into those symbols simply appearing and existing in text.
We’re here to change all that. Because now that we know, we’ll never be able to unsee what we’ve seen. And we like to pass on the curse of curiosity.