“Prototyping is failing forward”, I was taught recently at the School of Design Thinking. Though the institute mainly focuses on the creation of products and services prototyping early to fail faster is a significant advise for the field of communication design, too …

… and a lesson the German car manufacturer Audi had to learn just in these days.

It’s latest ad campaign is build around a caption only engineers can come up with: *
Since I’m not a physicist or car enthusiast I’m not familiar with the term of “traction”, so I didn’t get it at all. Two days later and in broad daylight I was able to spot two more letters I missed earlier and to finally get the wordplay “Maximale (At)traktion” (similar to English “Maximum (at)traction”).

The visual problem was a simple one: the first two letters came in red outlines instead of full colour which made it impossible to read on a backlit poster at night. So after a couple of days Audi, its ad men and probably a few confused customers must have seen the same so the posters were changed to this design:

An earlier test of the poster in a more realistic environment including backlight would have revealed that the caption is illegible and truncated due to technical and cognitive challenges. This would have saved some money for the changes and avoided an unpleasant situation for the agency in charge.

So again: “Prototyping is failing forward” — a relevant rule for communication designers too as proven above. Insightful prototyping to all of you!

(* — no photoshop, just a backlit poster at night)