I have terrible handwriting. That's not an opinion, it's a fact.
I'm working on making it better but that is a slow and arduous path. To be honest it's like walking up an 80 degree incline. Computers only make it worse because that's the really easy moving walkway up the same hill.
But I digress.
This post is less about my inability to write legibly and more about perception. You, my lucky readers, get to accompany me back to sophomore year of high school. Specifically an english class during my spring semester.
For this class we had to keep a journal with our thoughts on the works we were reading — a task I executed diligently. Like all the other students I turned in my journal for the first round of check-ins around the midpoint of the semester.
I was proud of the journal and thought my insights were pretty sound. It turns out that didn't matter. We all got our journals back and my friend asked what grade I had received. I checked the last entry of the journal but I didn't have a grade, I had a note from the teacher.
It read, "You really need to type this so I can tell if you did the assignment correctly."
Now that probably wasn't too much to ask. After all my writing was pretty poor but not substantially worse than my friend who had received a grade. Naturally this did not sit well with my indignant teenager self. I left the class fuming.
She would get my journal typed up. Oh boy would she get it typed up.
Even in those days I was a pretty big nerd so I knew about a couple of font downloading sites. Poring through fonts I found one that was nearly identical to my scrawl and downloaded it to my mom's computer. I typed up the entire journal in that font, printed it out, compared and was very pleased with myself.
They were both horrible documents to look at. My teacher would be so pissed!
The next day I turned in the assignment for her to grade, relishing in my subversiveness. Much to my delight I received the assignment back a week later with her verdict. And wouldn't you know it she gave me full credit.
This was very confusing to me. The assignments didn't look any different from each other except for the paper they were on but the second one had gotten her approval. I was not very happy that my experiment didn't work but it was a good lesson in context. I had given her what she had asked for so she accepted it just fine. Both of us were happy because we perceived the situation as us winning.
Bringing it back to advertising it's kind of an important lesson too. Especially on the client side of things. The client is going to ask you to change stuff around, add text here or not use that inflammatory word. The best way to approach this situation is to do something you still like while fitting into what the client wants. It might not be your perfect artistic vision, you might not even understand why they liked it after the changes, but the work got produced.
And at the end of the day work that shows up sells, and work that doesn't doesn't.