Thoughts - Should we be writers as well as designers?

We’re always getting hearing those old words – “design is communication”. But what exactly is communication? As designers we tend to think it’s always something visually – “I’m not a writer” most of us cry out. Well maybe it’s time we should be.

Take this simple example. You’ve got a submit button on your page, but having the word “submit” there is dry and boring. Yeah, it tells you what it does; it’s going to submit the information, but there’s a million more interesting ways you can say it. “Send it off!” tells you the same thing that the button does, but it’s just something a bit more fun, and adds character to your site in a sea of standard text., and that much needed little detail.

Even though we may not write the content a lot of the time if/when we get a job in a design studio, it’s still worth considering the little things such as the names of buttons or navigation pages. They add that little extra something to a site or piece of print, because the majority of people visit websites for the information that’s on it. Most people unless they’re a designer or in a similar profession don’t even take a stock of the design. Some may say “that’s nice that” or some other fleeting comment, but the majority of people are there for the information. And – presuming again – that the information is more than likely to be text, it should be our duty to make sure that that text is good as well.

Just in the same way that a website might be badly designed, there’s millions of websites out there with lackluster writing that brings down an otherwise cracking design. Once the design fades away, there’s only the text left.

And if that isn’t done well then you’ve just lost the whole of your target audience.

I think it's fitting to conclude with the final line of the article that provided inspiration for this post:

Design is about communication, and it takes more than pixels to communicate.