Maybe I’m the wrong person to be writing about grammar, since I don’t believe mine is perfect, but I do believe that grammar is incredibly important when it comes to design. While many could argue that design is a visual artform, at some point, you’re going to have to incorporate some copy into it and if that copy is being seen by the public, it’s important to get it right.

Wrong wrong wrong

I think one of the worst offenders that I can name off the top of my head are the WHSmith’s Christmas adverts, which have annoyed me since they were first aired two years ago. Their tagline is:

This Christmas. Think WHSmith’s.

How is that acceptable grammar? Anyone with even a basic knowledge of grammar knows that that is nowhere near a correct phrase. If anything, it should be:

This Christmas, think WHSmith’s.

Why have they used a full stop instead of a comma? It makes no sense.

I’m sure the majority of people won’t even notice it at least on a concious level, but I believe that on a subconcious level, most people will. It’s not going to make them buy less or think of WHSmith’s as a bad company, but I do believe that it speaks a lot about a company if they can’t get simple grammar correct. I don’t believe it speaks much about the design agency that was commissioned to create this advert, either. Little details like this make a big difference.

Additionally and perhaps sometimes a worse offender is spelling. I think one of the main spelling mistakes people seem to make – and businesses too – is “your” instead of “you’re”. If you’re writing your copy in Word, Word doesn’t know that “your” is the incorrect spelling because the word “your” is correctly spelt, but it’s certainly not the right word to use. So many companies don’t seem to proof their copy so it actually makes sense.

Another offender would be jargonese. In other words, writing something so that it sounds like you know what you’re talking about, but in reality, confusing your audience by beating around the bush with superfluous paragraphs. Your customer wants to know what you’re offering without having to read 5 paragraphs of blurb to get to it.

Language is such an important design element to consider when you’re designing anything at all. The copy can sometimes mean the difference between your customer being confused or content.

So, next time you’re planning on writing some copy, take another look at it, send it to a few people first. Whatever you do, don’t rely on your own judgement when it comes to copy because more often than not, because you’re writing it, it will make sense to you but not others. Proofread it yourself and then get someone else to as well. You’ll save yourself a headache when your customers are complaining about that full stop instead of a comma.

Once it was all uploaded, I had a quick browse through it and tried to put myself in the position of a potential client or visitor and I felt quite uncomfortable looking at my own site. I wasn’t happy with how it looked. I didn’t think that I had displayed my work well enough. After viewing it a few more times, I’m slowly coming around to the idea. It’s strange, really. I mean, I designed it exactly how it looks, no one else so in theory, I should be completely happy with it, but I’m not. I think perhaps what I’ve done is design the website as a standalone design, rather than considering what the site will be used for. I’ll see how things go. It’s certainly an improvement on my previous design, though.

The only thing left to do is point my domain name at the site, since it’s hosted somewhere differently to my current site and this is proving problematic. I should hopefully get that sorted within the next few hours. Hopefully. And then all that’s required  is a little bit of patience for the domain to take its time repointing to the site. I’m excited about finally getting it launched.

It will be a soft launch, though. It’s coming up to Christmas, which means I can’t really do much self promotional work in terms of actually getting out there and making people aware of me, simply because it’s a little too expensive to get anything printed. While at University I can use the discounted printing to my advantage. I have a few ideas on how to increase my hits to the site.

One thing that I’m hoping I’ll be able to promote along with my site is this blog, which is proving more popular than I thought it would be, considering I’ve yet to link to it anywhere. Although it’s not been advertised anywhere, I’ve currently recieved 200 hits to it, which my article on the BBC News theme tune being a good four times more popular than any other post I’ve made so far. It’s nice to see that there are people really interested in the same kinds of things that I am.

Although I’m now on Christmas break, that doesn’t actually mean I can rest, unfortunately. There’s still plenty of work that I have to be getting on with. This includes two competition briefs and an essay to write. Additionally, I had to submit a competition brief just before my break, paying £30 just to enter. If I win though, I’ll win £2,000 and a four week placement at Pentagram. You can view the competition brief here. I’ll be going into more detail with this brief in another post.

I’m hoping that while I at least have a little bit of free time, I can begin the process of getting my name out into the open and start getting work in for myself. It’s going to be a long process and one which has many outcomes. None of which I’m very sure about. However, I’m confident that if I really put some effort into it, it’ll produce the results I want.

As I said in my previous post, my business cards were the first part of my plan and they’ve proven to be really popular with whoever I’ve shown them to. It’s really nice to see that they were money well spent.