Sweating over your microcopy? Good job.
Why you should always have the time and budget to nail the details
There’s an impressionistic portrait of Mohandas Gandhi in a train cabin in Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited that I’m sure Anderson commissioned just for his set.
It’s one tiny detail in a sea of tiny details that make Anderson’s train set one of the most extraordinary microcosms in the history of Hollywood.
Great details like the Gandhi painting situate viewers in Anderson’s made-up world without them even realizing it. And, no, trains in India don’t actually look like the love child of Willy Wonka and Antoni Gaudí, but for you and me they do. And it makes a huge difference to how we interact with Anderson’s film.
It’s the same for the little bits of copy we write to situate readers in brand experiences. Every detail counts, no matter how small.
In fact, if you think back to the last time you used a website and were delighted by the experience, chances are, the things you really liked weren’t the homepage icons, the animations, or even the tagline. They were the little details like the way they said thank you after you ordered something or the original wording of a form error message.
That microcopy is what fleshes out the website’s voice. It’s everywhere you look, and in hundreds of places you don’t necessarily look. According to the UX Collective’s John Saito, Dropbox UI uses over 27,000 messages. That’s about four and half times as many sentences as the first Harry Potter novel! Each one of those 27,000 messages was handcrafted with intent.
If you’re a web copywriter and you’re hearing the word microcopy for the first time, don’t worry. You’ve been writing it for ages. It’s probably the copy you always forget to itemize fully when preparing a proposal. When you deliver a project, you may dump it all in a single doc called “Extra Screens.”
Going forward, don’t. First, those extra screens are really important — just like the painting in Wes Anderson’s train. Unless you nail them, the whole structure falls apart. So it’s worth having the time and budget to get them just right.
Second, creatively, it’s just so much fun to let the brand you’ve been meticulously voicing for weeks loosen up a little and chat directly with your audience when they least expect it.
It could be funny rating descriptions, like the ones you find on Yelp, the clothing retailer Modcloth taking the time to explain why they want your phone number (to protect you, of course), or even WeTransfer’s talky FAQ. Tiny details. Majorly loveable.
Which brings us back to microcopy as a craft.
These little messages are undeniably important. They help define the brands you’re writing about, and they absolutely engage readers at a level that an amazing tagline can’t ever.
So no more dumping them in the “Extra Screens” drawer or giving yourself an hour at the end of the project to pump them out.
It’s ok to sweat over your microcopy. It’s even more ok to let clients know that they’re the soul of the message, and not the garnish on the salad.
Charging for them, and taking the time to get them just right, is more than ok, too.
