The issue here is not the effectiveness of hand drawn headings, but the effectiveness of hand drawn headings when compared to computer-generated ones. They are not the same thing.

Of course, you can use whatever you like. But why?

A lot of people create art for non-artistic reasons: because they want to make a living, or because they have some other goal that has nothing to do with creating art.

Other people do it because they love it, and it makes them happy just thinking about doing it. That’s fine too. But if you’re doing something primarily because you love doing it, you’ll never be as good at it as someone who is doing it because they also think they can make a living at it. Your work won’t be as marketable as theirs will be. And that means that, when your goal is to make money, your work won’t be as good as theirs either.

And what’s true for art is true for anything else: if your goal is to enjoy writing, then you’ll never write as well as someone who enjoys writing but also wants to make a living from it.*

You should know that we are living in the age of image. The internet, as well as other types of media, have led to a massive increase in the number of people who find information by reading phrases, or headlines. Writing great ones can help you get more traffic to your blog, create stronger social media presence, and attract customers to your products and services.

Trying to write great headlines implies getting your audience’s attention, which is quite a challenge given how much competition you face. You need to come up with a headline that will be remembered. Here is where writing an illusion art comes in handy. Those who read such headlines are intrigued and want to know more about what they’re seeing.

Let’s go over some points that will help you come up with the best illusion art:

Hands down, my favorite illusion is the one that shows your hand drawing a picture of your head. It’s fantastic to see such a convincing image emerge from your own handiwork, but even more fun is the realization that you’re being tricked into creating it.

The first time I saw this illusion, I asked myself what other kinds of illusions might be possible. I figured if you could make an image out of something as simple as a hand drawing it, an artist could come up with all sorts of crazy ways to fool people.

You could create a magic painting that looked like a haphazard collage until you walked around it, or a sculpture that looked like just a bunch of weird junk until someone sat on it and everything fell into place.

Like any truly great discovery, though, my ideas were far greater than my ability to carry them out. These days I’m mostly content to appreciate the work of illusion artists who have done much better jobs of bringing my vision to life.

When it comes to drawing, I am a complete amateur. But when it comes to headlines, I’m the opposite.

Amateur or professional, there is a problem you have to solve if you want to make art: what to draw?

If you are an expert, like my friend who draws with her toes, then you already know what you want your art to be. But most of us aren’t experts at anything.

My friend who draws with her toes has been drawing with her toes since she was a little girl. She could probably draw a good picture of her toes by now even if she hadn’t practiced for years; but if you asked me to draw something using only my toes I would either fail or hurt myself.

I used to have the same problem with headlines. Someone would ask me for a suggestion and I would blurt out something that sounded good at the time but wasn’t very good once I thought about it later.

I started making deliberate practice in writing better headlines when I realized that a blog post needs two headlines: one for the home page and one for the actual article.

There are only so many times you can use “you won’t believe what happened next” before people stop believing that they won’t believe it. The

No one ever sees an issue as a whole. Since the brain can only hold 7±2 items in working memory, we can’t think about everything at once. We have to work around this limitation by dividing the issue into parts. This is why people find it so hard to argue with a graph.

Let’s say you see the following graph:

The headline says “More than 80% of high school students are on Facebook.” You glance at it and think, “Wow, more than 80%! That’s a lot!” Then you make the mistake of looking at the actual data:

Your first reaction is likely to be, “Hey — what happened to that headline?” But then you have to go back and look at the graph again to convince yourself that indeed, more than 80% is less than 100%.

This is a natural reaction because this is exactly how we process information. Our brains look for a small number of things (Headline: More than 80% | Actual Data: 84%) and ignore the rest (the numbers and units). This means that when you’re designing charts and graphs, you should always include labels and footnotes explaining what every category on your axis really means — because otherwise people won’t understand your message.

If a headline doesn’t work, it can be tempting to blame the designer. But often the problem isn’t really with the design – it’s that the headline is trying to do too many things.

Consider this example, from some students at the University of Washington:

The first thing you might notice is that “New Cancer Test” and “Woman Sees Breast Cancer in Own Arm” both sound like they’re saying different things. They actually say exactly the same thing. “New Cancer Test” is an attempt to give an upbeat spin to a very negative story – namely, that mammograms don’t work very well and are killing women with false positives. The second headline is doing something different: it’s moving away from the medical specifics to something more general – in this case, focusing on how scary breast cancer is, rather than how flawed screening methods are.

But the underlying problem here is that these two headlines are trying to say two very different things, and each one fails at its own task. One sounds like a piece of health-related clickbait, and the other sounds like a sensationalist tabloid cover.*

If you want your headlines to succeed, ask yourself if they’re really accomplishing what you want them to accomplish. Sometimes what you really need

It’s not that there isn’t good advice to give. There is. But there is a great deal of bad advice, too. And the bad advice is not always easy to distinguish from the good advice.

For example, consider this misleading headline from an email that was sent to me recently: “The single most important thing you can do for your writing.” The email advised me that before I write anything, I should create an “outline” for it, and that my outline should consist of nothing more than a single sentence: “In one sentence, what is this article about?”

I don’t know why anyone would think this was good advice. It’s not bad advice per se; sometimes you do have to write an outline. But it’s not even close to the single most important thing you can do for your writing. It’s much closer to useless advice than it is to helpful advice.