What A Designer Can Teach A Copywriter

Perhaps because it’s this time of year—almost 20 years ago—that the industry lost a creative director who was both mentor and friend to me. Mach Arom was an agency leader at high profile firms such as Ogilvy and FCB, with titles such as Partner, Group Creative Director and Senior Vice President, Executive Creative Director.

Mach, however, always referred to himself simply as a designer.

Most of my previous bosses had been writers, so Mach’s influence on me was distinct because I had so much I could learn from him through the eyes of design. He surrounded himself with a diverse and loyal creative pack—a mix of writers, art directors, designers, producers and technologists. Many followed him from agency to agency.

Design changes the world and it can also change how you work. Here are a few lessons that still stick with me now:

Show vs. Tell:? Those years were early times for infographics and making the vastly complex abundantly clear. Communications, I learned from Mach, could be a visual teacher. It would be years before I discovered the beauty of frameworks in consulting, but I realize now how well prepared I was. Photography was also something to discover. For an LG campaign, we wanted the consumer to feel the experience of a next-generation LCD TV. I wrote a million headlines to capture the strategy of feeling present, but in the end it was an image of 100 knives dangling dangerously from a ceiling above that made everyone feel frighteningly there.

Global flavor: On his office coffee table, Mach always had a full bowl of spicy candy, usually sourced from trips to exotic places on his vacations to India or back home in Thailand. He was a t-shirt wearing "Global Citizen" type and wanted us to understand and market to the world, not just the traditional U.S. What I discerned was that writers often work in a consistent trademark style, but the best designers explore and bring in components from their world experience. Everything can’t be Helvetica or Times Roman.

Run-on: Mach’s emails were famously long and direct and lowercase, and you wouldn't want to be an account executive on the wrong end of a tirade. The argument defending a strategy or creative choice was, well, an argument. Colorful. Smart. Unrelenting. Factual. As writers, we're so careful with our words, do we sometimes lose our strength in our succinctness? David Ogilvy taught me to be precise for impact. Mach, however, would give you 10 ways to find the one answer that persuaded you.?

Details: I was careful with a word or two, sure, but the attention to detail from a design eye included not only form and grid but also how the meeting was put together to set the first impression and the tone. From the cover page of the presentation to the handouts we printed wrapped in ribbons. Art directors have vision, but Mach was also a graphic designer. Everything graphic mattered.

Writers, of course, can also teach designers quite a bit and he said he learned from me. I was emphatic about the difficulty of reading headlines in all caps and multiple colors. But it was also the small powerful touches like giving that call-to-action “Learn more” a cute visual arrow which made the difference now and then. Click.