I'm kinda shocked by how many people are saying "they like the poster on the left". The one on the left is a train wreck.
In the poster on the right, my eye is drawn to the enormous headings, which contain no useful information by themselves. The "Come Visit" heading isn't close enough to the address, and the address/phone/URL has been squeezed into a single block of tiny, fuzzy text. Compare that to the left poster, where each one is distinct from the other.
I feel the need to put on my glasses to read the one on the right, but not the one on the left. That alone indicates a major issue and potential loss of audience.
THIS IS LARGER, SO EASIER TO READ, RIGHT?
Font size alone I agree with you (and a light - serif - white text on a black background has some issues with artifacts, which are visible on the flier), but the whole thing is a mess.
> In the poster on the right, my eye is drawn to the enormous headings, which contain no useful information by themselves.
Yes, it contains. It's an aid to point you to the right section.
Because you scan the bigger text first, the first thing most people will read is "Aikido - Beginner classes" then follow the right column
> The "Come Visit" heading isn't close enough to the address
I agree, this is debatable, one possibility would be to replace it with "Try it" and/or put "Come Visit" or "Visit Us" above the address
> and the address/phone/URL has been squeezed into a single block of tiny, fuzzy text
This is another heuristical cue and to separate it from the rest of the text.
For bonus points, pluralize the days ("Tuesdays 7:30 p.m.") and separate the phone and URL from the address a bit.
The point is, the information is self-describing. It doesn't need a header to announce what it is.
The question was "which one looks cleaner?", not "which one makes it easier to find information?", and to my eye the one on the right has more noise (the balance of spacing, border around the image, more varied fonts). I guess there are arguments for both or neither, but it's clearly not cut and dry.
The web abounds with bootstrap websites which fail to give any real information.
The poster on the left also has slightly better call to action (CALL 603-431-8560).
tbh, neither of them are all that great. The right one introduces a serifed font which clashes with the non-serif fonts everywhere else. From a marketing perspective, Akido is often associated with clean minimalism and serifed fonts are not.
The new design also uses generally smaller font sizes, which are hard to read on a poster. This allows for the use of white space to denote sections, but it creates so much white space that the designer struggles to fill it all up with something and introduces a new design element (the brushed circle) to simply fill up space.
Where non-serifed fonts are used, they aren't particularly readable, the kerning is off and the weight is too high in general. The leading is also off in quite a few places, particularly between the section headers and the first line of the serifed-font section text.
Some more downthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9282032
I can't speak to whether it would materially impact the effectiveness of the ad in generating leads, but an important aspect in soliciting leads seems to be filtering them. If your potential leads don't know what your criteria are, you're more likely to get calls from people asking basic information like when the classes are, or whether their 10-year old can join. If the ad were structured in a way in which class times and age limits were highlighted, these people likely wouldn't bother calling.
You can, of course, simply repeat the information from the flyer over the phone, but if you're wondering why these people are calling to ask those questions in the first place, you might want to look at your ad design. After all, the information is there. It's just that most people see your call to action before they see that other stuff, and so they just call you instead.
"AKIDO"
<picture of one guy throwing another guy>
603-431-8560
it would probably work as well as either of these designs, and they'll end up answering the same inane questions on the receiving end.
More importantly, the questions people ask can be good signalling to a business how they can adjust their offerings. There might be an entire market of people who really want to take Akido, but they can only do it on Thursday nights. This poster might filter them all out. But a bunch of people calling to see if they offer Thursday night beginner classes might cause the school to adjust their schedule to offer that class, thereby capturing that part of the market.
It's odd, when I was looking at that aikido ad, I thought I could faintly smell newsprint paper...
There must be a lot of testing and research in "cheap looking" ads, this might be a great example of the resulting emotional responses.
Question for those who think the left one is cleaner: what if this was a web page? You need to look at each one zoomed-in one at a time. Would you still consider the left one cleaner?
A design isn't good if a designer needs to tell me to look again, but look better this time.
Again, I'm not saying that this is a perfect example, but the points he makes are valid. I've had to deal with similar issues creating figures and illustrations for scientific manuscripts. Scientists are not great illustrators by and large, although some are. It's worth studying the successful examples, and to adopt their practices.
Heck, the one on the left has a much better call to action, it says CALL 603-431-8561 in big letters. The one on the right has the "Come Visit" clearer though.
The one on the right might be "cleaner", but I bet that the one on the left converts a LOT better (simply by being more readable).
Maybe the idea that the right one is more appealing to everyone is a lot more subjective than he would have us believe.