Why Ads and Poster Making Contests Don't Mix

I got to hand it over to Marvi. She was the one who let me borrow her book on how to make an effective ad. The basic tenet? Never make an ad look cluttered. If there are too many elements, remove them all. Eliminate, eliminate. Most often, the best ads are just a tagline and a picture.

Which is why I find it interesting to point out why poster-making artists generally exempt themselves from this cardinal rule. When I was in school and I joined these contests, the best posters were the ones cluttered with the most detail. Complexity reigned. The more elements, the better. The more colors, the better. And so on and so forth. It was like an escalating arms race, where every contestant had to fill in every square inch of his poster paper with something to assure himself a chance at winning.

If you also happen to pass by schools or institutions fenced in by concrete walls, you would see rows and rows of these walls either covered by graffiti or covered by paintings or murals, a remnant of past wall-painting contests. Most notably, these paintings were also classic cases of halo-halo imagery, filled with disjointed symbols and images arranged to exude an acute sense of chaotic harmony.

Ironically, both polar styles of presentation work quite well. The western, minimalist style of ad-making finds it home among societies riddled with too much information, where every ad had to get its point across with the least time and effort. On the other hand, our more rambunctious style of presenting a message goes well with our culture and temperament. Admittedly, our attention is often directed to what is flashy and, certainly, ads or posters effused with colors and images always catch our fancy.

Humorous but true, isn't it?