Why copy matter for designers and for you as a client also

Quick disclaimer. I’m not sure if “design product” is a real term, but here, I mean any result of a designer’s work, e.g., a brochure, a banner, a deck.

My design process always starts with content. Without the content – the actual copy – we won’t create a compelling design because a compelling design is all about storytelling (sorry, not sorry for the buzzword).

From the side, graphic design might seem like a solely visual process: putting together colors, illustrations, icons, photos, choosing fonts. In reality, design is about showing off specific ideas to achieve a specific goal for specific people. Information – the content – is the boss of everything. By the way, in this regard, it doesn’t even matter if we design a simple leaflet, or a comprehensive landing page, a multi-page presentation, or a complex app. Though in this article, we’ll focus more on marketing and growth design products.

For starting the design process, a designer should have a copy that is as close to the final version as possible. The volume of the text, the logical sections, the main idea of each chunk, and the narration style – everything matters.

The volume of text = the volume of a design product. We need to decide how many pages should be in a brochure, how many slides in a presentation, how to fit the text into one-pager, etc. And from the volume of the design product itself, we’ll be able to understand the amount of illustrative material needed and, therefore, the time scope of the project.

The logical sections = the actual storytelling and the flow of the design product. For text to be readable, the designer supports it with illustrations and other visual elements. That allows the user to grasp the overall idea and notice the crucial details.

The main idea of each section = the illustrative material needed. And also, we shouldn’t forget that text plays the role of visual graphics at the same level as the actual illustrations, icons, and other graphics. So we can use the main idea of each chunk to show off the concept by itself.

The style of narration = the visual style of illustrative material. Of course, it also depends on the brand’s visual style. And in the ideal situation, both the visual style and the copy style should be defined in the brand guidelines. But if the brand is new and only in the building stage, we can conclude the style from our goal and target audience.

Now you can see how it’s all connected and that the copy is necessary for a designer to start building layout.

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