We used to call them art directors. Apparently they’re designers nowadays.

All the good ones understand that their primary functions are: get everything to fit, handle a few tech things, guide the reader’s attention around a piece and make sure the copy is easy to read.

That last part gives me fits every working day of my life. Years ago in Toronto I was paired with a wonderful designer named Ray. Ray was, and probably still is, a very artistic fellow, wonderful sense of design. His only problem, with me, was that he deliberately made the copy almost impossible to read. He didn’t think that was what he was doing; he thought he was making the overall piece pretty. He’d use sans serif reverse type for huge chunks of body copy or small type on a tone background. He’d set ads and brochures in superwide type. Ray and I liked each other but we didn’t get along professionally because I insisted that he make it easy for people to read the frigging copy. Eventually we parted company and I worked with two terrific art directors in a row, Jiri Matousek and Lynn Sproatt.

I’ve met two direct mail design geniuses in my life, Ted Kikoler of Toronto and Heikki Ratalahti of San Francisco. I never got to work with either. They’re both very nice guys and easy to talk to, but Ted was too expensive in my Toronto days and I always thought that Heikki worked only with the great copywriter Bill Jayme.

Ted once made one tiny change to a direct mail control that resulted in a huge lift in response. The client was a Canadian construction trade newspaper called The Daily Commercial News. Their subscription package went out in a large brown kraft envelope with the paper’s name and return address in the upper left hand corner. Ted got a typewriter font and typed out the publisher’s name and title with one of the letters raised too high, as often happened with old manual typewriters, and slotted it into the small space above the paper’s name.

It looked something like this:

What was the point? Ted knew that anything that makes a direct mail piece look like it had been touched by human hands gets more attention. The apparently mistyped letters did that delightfully.

Both Ted and Heikki are masters of the power of simplicity, crisp, clean, obvious and supremely compelling simplicity. And they’re direct mail people, not advertising people slumming in the DM neighborhood. God bless ‘em.