d mood, "that you
fellows are not as efficient as you might be. Here are our
advertisements--from papers everywhere. The illustrations print
abominably! Look at them. The matter has been called to my attention
many times--by the newspapers themselves, by our road representatives
and by local dealers. They say our electro service and our straight
national campaigns are all muddied up with pictures that nobody can
decipher. Here's conclusive proof of it. Not a clean-looking cut in
the series and you can't blame it on paper and press work and all
that--they're _all_ bad!"

The advertising manager glanced casually at the exhibits. The
criticism was valid. Here was a daily newspaper campaign, running into
space valued at approximately sixty thousand dollars, and the
displays, three-fourths illustration, were mussy, involved, smeared
up, and unsatisfactory from a reproductive standpoint. Solid black
backgrounds were a sickly, washed-out gray and in other places
intricate pen work had "run-together."

It was equally true that clippings of competitive advertising and
advertising in general, selected at random, were strangely clean-cut.
The comparison was startling.

"Mr. X," finally observed the ad-manager, "I see what you mean; all of
us in this department have known of it, kept track of it; and the
remarkable part of the entire situation is that these results can be
traced back to you and your personal insistence on a certain type of
pen and ink design, executed in a specific technique. These matters
came up for your supervision and O. K. You did not care for the bold,
simple outline drawings first submitted. You preferred too many, and a
glut of detail. All of which is not compatible with newspaper
printing, even in large space. We were afraid of this and said so at
the time. Our objection was overruled. It's one thing to prefer a
pleasing, perhaps highly artistic pen technique and quite another to
apply it to fast presses, poor ink and hurried make-ready. A great
many things can happen, and _do_ happen, to a newspaper design before
it is printed and in the readers' hands."

DISREGARDING FUNDAMENTALS

Sometimes it is better to come out with the frank, brutal truth. In a
great many instances, poor newspaper reproduction is the direct result
of some executive's marked preference for a certain artist or a
certain technique, regardless of whether the man is qualified to draw
for this field, or whether the technique is f