Yellow Pages Advertising Tip # 13
Pictures Trump Clip Art
Clip art has its place, but the proliferation of clip art has done almost as much harm to graphic design as the emergence of 10,000 font CD-ROMs. While clip art has its place, pictures trump clip art almost every time.
I used to test this by flipping open a yellow pages directory I had to the rental car section. There were two, nearly identical ads, side by side. One featured a line art drawing of a can. The other featured a gray scale image of a car. I asked people to pick the ad that caught their eye. Nine times out of ten, people picked the ad with the picture over the ad with the line art.
What holds for rental cars, holds even more for people. Use photographs and cut the image out of the background if necessary.
This tip submitted by Matt Michael of the Service Roundtable