Why Designers Should Be Writers
It’s good to do hard things
Along with being Figma wizards and typographical geniuses, I want every designer at my company to be a writer. Or to at least regularly work on their writing.
If you know me, you might think this is an annoyingly predictable desire. My background is in English and journalism, and I came up as a copy editor for newspapers and academic publishers. I wear the badge of word-nerdery proudly. I keep a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style at my desk, even though I’m now (very happily) in the world of design.
I work at a small independent design company with roots in magazine design. The discipline of graphic design leads our practice at Journey Group, as it should. And as a content designer, I’ve learned—and continue to learn—so much about the history and principles of good graphic design from my remarkable colleagues.
But I occasionally sense that there’s a gulf between us, a simmering bias that unhelpfully divides our areas of expertise. The vibe I often get from talented graphic designers is that we do two totally different things: “Oh, we’re image people, and you’re word people. Ne’er the twain shall meet.” Or, “Just put in some lorem ipsum and we’ll figure out the content later.” Or, “Who cares if the words don’t make sense: What color should the button be?”
I get it, I really do: Drawing shapes, choosing typefaces, and selecting spot illustrations seems very different—and more enticing—than writing gobs of help text, conducting a website audit, and modeling content types.
But I’d like to contend that our disciplines are more similar than they may appear. Furthermore, the persistent belief that writing is just for “word people” weakens the practice of graphic design on the whole. Why?
Writing is just thinking.
Being asked to write may take us back to 1,000-word essay assignments in high-school English class. I enjoy writing about Emily Dickinson as much as the next person, but even I never want to do that again.
So why do we force children to write all these dreadful papers anyway? It’s not because they’re so delightful to read. It’s because we write to find out what we think.
Writing is just a method of thinking.
It’s not some elite skill that God only gives to English majors and novelists. Writing is a way of thinking, problem solving, and discovering ideas. Writing allows us to analyze our own thoughts and the thoughts of others. Through skillful writing, we can entertain, persuade, cajole, encourage, and explain. These are all skills that every graphic designer should hone.
As Sally Kerrigan writes for A List Apart:
“[Writing is] a practical skill — particularly since most of our online communication is text-based to begin with. When you write about your work, it makes all of us smarter for the effort, including you — because it forces you to go beyond the polite cocktail-party line you use to describe what you do and really think about the impact your work has. Done well, it means you’re contributing signal, instead of noise.”
We’re all writing constantly, whether through innumerable text and Slack messages or thousands of emails. But are we working on writing well?
(Good) writing is hard. That’s why we should work at it.
It is good for designers to do hard things, especially when those things will improve their craft.
This may sound like a leap, but I promise: You’ll draw better rectangles because you worked on writing clearer sentences.
The late Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough said, “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”
Personally, I never trust anyone who says they “love writing.” To me, that just means they haven’t worked at it very hard. Writing, most of the time, is decidedly unfun. The fact that writing is difficult for you is a great sign; it means that you are approaching it properly and showing that first glimmer of recognition that writing—and writing well—might involve more than just putting marks on a pad or Google doc.
Design, at its core, is about revealing: a path forward, a better way, a new solution. But it is necessarily difficult for us to participate in this revelatory work of design if we haven’t thought about the problem well. There is nothing for us to reveal if we haven’t sorted out our thoughts. I contend that writing can help us do this.
Much like sketching, writing allows us to uncover a problem’s true nature. To uncover what we think, we must first suffer through our rough drafts and terrible sentences. We have to find and form the good idea—and discard the bad ones. If we never take the time to improve our writing, our thinking will remain stagnant and weak.
Failing to work on our writing means failing to work on our thinking. It’s harder to write a short sentence than a long one. It’s harder to write a good email than a bad one. This is why we have to keep at it.
The greatest designers I know are great because they’ve been working at their craft for a long time. They keep trying. They learn from their mistakes. They never stop sharpening their skills.
Writing is much the same. It’s very difficult and tedious to write well. This is why I think it’s worth doing. As designers, as people who make a living solving problems on behalf of others, it is good for us to do hard things.
Write small.
The opportunities for improving our writing abound. Whether it’s the introduction of our work in a client-facing email or a Slack message requesting sign-ups for the company potluck, we’re writing constantly. Even these small instances can provide an opportunity for sharpened communication.
Whatever you’re writing, take comfort in remembering that every beginning is messy. Start with the tiniest gem of a purpose (e.g., “I want this client to understand why we chose to rework the landing page layout”). Then dive into your rough draft, filled with errors and asides and [TK ??]. Then keep chipping away at it. Re-read it to yourself. Catch a misspelling. Choose a better word. Restructure some sentences. Make them shorter. Cut out filler words. Re-read it again.
In this labor-intensive way, you will find out what you think. Your writing will get better, and you will become more persuasive. Your thinking will get sharper as you work to communicate your ideas to others—and your visual design skills will benefit immensely from this verbal labor.
Study good writing.
Finally, be a student of great writers.
Reading copiously teaches us how to think better and write better. I’m inclined to believe that reading everything you can get your hands on will sharpen your writing skills, but I also believe it’s well worth the effort to read and truly study the masters.
Great writers abound, but I’ll offer a few specific suggestions.
- If you’re a fan of atomic design, I suggest Virginia Tufte’s marvelous book Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, in which she collects beautiful sentences from literature and history and categorizes them grammatically, by all the types of sentence you could possibly create.
- If you like getting lost in a story, I recommend studying the stylistic flourishes of masters of form, such as Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita), John Cheever (The Collected Stories), Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse), and Toni Morrison (Beloved).
- If you want to get better at no-nonsense nonfiction writing, I recommend John McPhee’s archived essays in the New Yorker.
- If you want to learn how to write beautifully using as few words as possible, read the Collected Stories of Lydia Davis.
- If you just want some digestible, practical advice, I recommend Sally Kerrigan’s article for A List Apart, referenced earlier in this piece. (In general, all the books I’ve read from A List Apart are also useful and well written.)
In an age drowning in written content, I continue to hope that visual designers will bravely wade into the stream of words. We need the designer’s gift of revealing a brighter path now more than ever. And I, for one, I hope the revelation comes in a series of beautiful sentences.
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