New Perspective: Switching Creative Lanes

I’m a designer.

Somehow I convinced Struck to let me work for them for a few months as a writer working on a style guide and strategy for their Instagram. There was this part of me that thought since I am a creative and writing is creative, that I would just naturally be good at it.

Well, I was and I wasn’t.

I had forgotten that when I started learning design, I wasn’t learning design — I was learning rules. I was learning principles and laws and ideas. Writing has these too.

In design we have composition, and in writing there’s syntax.

In design we have hierarchy, and in writing there’s structure.

In design we have proximity and repetition and contrast and scale.

In design we agonize over color schemes, and in writing we swap out adjectives 80 times to find the perfect one.

The past 10 weeks I have been learning the rules, learning to break them, and learning to make new ones. I had to learn not just to be accurate, but to also be compelling. I learned to use words to paint a picture instead of relying on my images to communicate words.

The biggest difference was rewiring my brain to not think of copywriting as an accompaniment to creative work, but as a creative body unto itself. I had this notion that writing was only a reflection of creativity. It’s not.

Writing starts as thought — words in our heads. This whole process has been about me learning to respect words, the structure of words, the order of words, the number of words.

I now view writing as a catalyst for creativity, not a reflection of it.

I’m learning to start with writing as a designer. I’m learning that the way I tailor my words to accompany my work matters. I’m changing the way my copy interacts with my visuals.

Learning to write makes me a better designer, because I now have more sets of rules to choose from, ignore, or break. My arsenal is now larger thanks to the courage of Struck.