A good tip on headlines.

This tip comes from one of the fine gentlemen at BBH London. He is a CD writer there and has a fantastic blog at http://scampblog.blogspot.com/. Its full of great tips and stories from advertising. Great for us up and comers.

Here's a good quote I liked regarding how a headline should be used:

"In fact, many of the world’s best headline-writers are quite open about their secret weapon – a great art director.

With a really well art-directed headline, the idea and the execution are seamless. I like ideas where the headline is written in a place where type naturally occurs. Which means that your headline can be a photographed object - a visual element in its own right, which just happens to have type on it - rather than a boring old typeset headline."

Charles hall, a professor at VCU, is adamant about this point and so am I. Headlines by themselves make it an ad instead of an interesting communication. Sometimes plopping down a headline is easy and gets it out the door, but by taking a few hours you can turn it into something people will actually read.