Designers vs copywriters.
Thes fight is over!
Copywriters and designers have been fighting over the importance of content vs design since the creation of digital products. It’s been the source of a few strong disagreements in our office too.
This was us 4 months ago… 🤯
The battle
The usual design process starts with ‘Lorem ipusm’ on wireframes, with designers laying out the visual flow of the product, setting up paragraphs with a set number of text lines and character length. Dummy texts tend to stay there a while, sometimes until the last UI reviews, as usually content is not ready when it should be.
From a copywriting perspective, it’s pretty hard to start writing content before you know how many pages you’re going to have, what their layout may be and how much space you will have. BUT, it’s equally as challenging to fit your copy within the restrictions designers often pose… paragraph lines, character length, positioning can drastically cut your copy. Words have different lengths and breaking paragraphs, and all of this needs to be relevant with imagery too to make the whole page ‘consistent’.
Frustrations
When copywriters really get into the flow of writing, they often realise both content and design do not fit as well as they hoped. An image needs to be inserted here to go with that text. Or we need to add a CTA microcopy button here now I’ve changed this text. So, how do these changes leave designers feeling?
Frustrated and annoyed. Not only is it time-consuming to manually copy and paste update change requests, but design systems sometimes have to be rethought, as content gradually starts to become a number one priority. This usual process of diss-collaboration we found painful for both sides. We really started to hate the process, and therefore, each other! Well, it wasn’t hate… just a lack of love really!
The solution
We searched for a solution to try and ease the growing tension between teams. We tried contentsync.io, collaborative google docs, and even comments on invision, but nothing did the job right. There was no real sync between tools, teams and people to enable both sides to stay creative. And there was no effective way to track the changes made (something we desperately needed!).
After a few too many arguments, Martin Lewandowski got to researching new products and tech news and found the saviour of all solutions… Kopie. This product allows designers and copywriters to work collaboratively with the actual design, not dry text. No fluffing around with spreadsheets or documents, simply editing content on design, through your browser. No need for installing another app for copywriters. Designers can export artboards or sync the copy back through one click. It was the solution we’d been searching for, finally! We managed to get access to the beta testing phase here. We tested it with our first internal project, our soon to launch online toolbox for digital teams.
The result?
Life got brighter for both sides! Using Kopie means content can be guided by the design but not restricted by it. Designers can sync edits and make small design changes if needed, saving us both a ton of time. It enables us to break free from the previous creative restraints, and no longer waste time writing paragraphs and creating designs that will go unused (something that really deflated both teams). Now, we’re making our product look good and sound good. So not only are we no longer in a battle of who is right and who is wrong (although we know I’m always right), we’re creating better digital products all round. 😉
Learn more about nuom here!
