OK. I am curious.

No. Not Yellow. Or Blue. Or even George.

I’m curious about this fad that’s shown up in a lot of online (and, I presume, TV and print) advertising lately. The fad for running single words into two or more lines. I’d like to know where it came from and, if I step on it hard enough, can I kill it?

Like in the ads for the energy drink (not the most potent one, water):

TH
AT’S
G

Or the ones for the latest exercise in useless environmental handwaving:

HOPE
NHA
GEN

I can only assume that, late one fine 11th hour before a deadline on Madison Avenue, a stressed graphic artist tried to run too many letters into too small a text box, thereby:

A. Revisiting the joke about planning ahead that has to be at least as old as the wooly mammoth;

B. Reliving the experiences of a gazillion ten-year-old kids and their first experiments with fonts in The Software That Shall Not Be Named®.

The graphic artist, being desperate, pitched his broken-word “design” to the client – who bought it.

And now it’s spreading faster than H1N1.

It has to be stopped. Has to be, I say. Before it catches on in the blogosphere.

I mean,

CAN
YOU
IMA
G
INE
IF
SOM
EON
E
TRI
ED
TO
WRI
TE
A
WH
OLE
POS
T
LIK
E
THI
S?

Hey. Let’s try this out on Twitter …

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.