Written for glare

From about this week, the person reading you is outside.

On a balcony at eleven at night. By a pool in the afternoon, sunglasses on, screen at half brightness because the battery has to last until the drive back. One hand, because the other is holding a child or a coffee or a towel. Sound off. Salt on the glass. Somebody talking to them while they read.

Copy written in April accounted for none of that. April copy was approved on a desk monitor in an air-conditioned room by people giving it their whole attention, which is the one condition under which it will never actually be read.

Under glare, light grey type is not light. It is absent. A first line that takes twelve words to reach its subject is a wall. A claim that only lands on the second read does not land, because in June there is no second read. Small type set over a photograph of the sea is a decision to be skipped by a person who would have bought.

The fix is not simply fewer words. Short and vague fails in sunlight the same way long and careful does. It is contrast and load: real black on real white, the offer and the reason in the first line rather than the third, one number rather than a range, and nothing that needs a caption to make sense.

The minute a summer reader lends you is shorter than the office one, and it is much brighter. Everything you need them to know has to survive the first line, in the sun, before the scroll continues.