Catch 22 – content before design or the design before content?
If you’ve already had a website designed for you in the past, you probably remember the process; first the designer created a lovely looking website that contained lots of strange text in Latin (more on this later) and lots of beautiful photos sourced on a stock library.
This probably looked amazing.
But then you were asked to “provide the content” and you set about writing the text for the website. And that’s where the great design fell apart because the text you found you needed to write wasn’t the same number of words that the designer lovingly entered to make the page look balanced.
So when you carefully came up with the correct content, you found that you perhaps wrote more than the word-count shown in the design and now the layout looks odd.
The answer? Content-first
We work in the opposite way. We ask for the content first so you have a chance to write the copy and then we design around that copy.
After all, how do we know what to design if we don’t know what it is you want to say?
Lorum Ipsum (or Latin), what’s that all about?
You might remember looking at the initial design and finding that the words on the page were all on Latin. There’s a good (and bad) reason for this. Using Latin is a great way to fill up an area of text to show how the page will look, but without having to write true content.
The downside to this approach is that the words form an integral part of the design and should be considered at the very start of the process.
The Cube Lab process
Our approach is one that we’ve been using for some time – content-first.
In this way, we as designers can assist with the content by helping you to focus on what your business does and then find the best way to get that message across through good design.