How do you explain...

How do you explain it to an adult that everything takes space?
I've never thought that I needed to, until I became a designer.

I'm sure that every designer is annoyed by this day in and day out:
Your clients or co-workers have no clue about how much stuff
can fit in the space of an ad or a page. And by the way,
they have been doing this for years, you just don't know how.

You've got a sheet of letter-size paper full of paragraphs of text
cut and pasted onto it that looks like a ransom note. You check
the ad size, 1/4 page. You talk to yourself, "I'm a designer,
not a magician. How do they expect me to fit all this crap in this space?"
Don't people know that every single thing you want to put in an ad
takes space unless it's your love and soul?

I worked on this 1/6 page ad last month. The client was wondering
why the photo in the ad was much smaller than the same size ad that
ran next to it. WHY??? I almost couldn't believe my eyes when I read
that e-mail. Do you really need to ask why? Can you count?
And do you understand the concept of big and small?
The other ad only has 4 lines of text and you have 8.
Your logo is 3 times as big as their logo.
And you have an 8-point border around.
And, no, taking out 2 words in 3 point
won't help to fit in 10 words in 7 point.

I rest my case.