In my last blog post I discussed the importance of proofreading before submitting a project to a designer.

Let’s talk about planning ahead again. This time let’s take on the headline. I’ve coined a term here at Canyon and we see it come up from time to time. It’s the dreaded “paragraph headline”—a headline that was born a paragraph and destined for a really small font size.

A headline is successful if it grabs the reader’s attention and gets them to read the copy. It’s especially successful if it prompts a follow-through response on your call to action.

Designers can deal with headlines of any length. But, we like to have them nailed down before we start designing. That gives us time to figure out how to express the headline visually.

To quote a post from Ted Nicholas, “you should go to copywriting jail if your headline is longer than 17 words.” I tend to agree with Ted. If you’re guilty of this, don’t worry, I’ve heard that copywriting jail isn’t that bad, days are spent sharpening government pencils and weekends at home writing mandatory public service blog posts.

Some say a long headline allows the reader to qualify themselves and weed out the “tire kickers” from the get go. So sadly, the dreaded “paragraph headline” may not be as dreadful as I once thought.

But this post is really about “What to do BEFORE you design.” Designers can make headlines work no matter what length. Just figure it out before you send it to a designer so we can aim for that ever-awesome marriage of visual elements and words. For examples of this, see Renata’s previous post, B2B Advertising Can Be Sexy. Great ads!