Lorem Ipsum is a lie

Why the designer in the room should be the loudest voice for writing it first.

I'm a designer. I'm supposed to be the one in the room arguing that design goes first.

I'm not going to.

Design-first sounds like respect for the craft. Give the designer room, let them set the vision, let the words fill in around it later. It feels generous. It is actually the fastest way to make a designer's work worthless, and I've done it to myself enough times to say so out loud.

Here's what design-first really is: you're tailoring a suit to a mannequin.

The mannequin is lorem ipsum. It has no proportions and no opinions. Its headline is always four words, its testimonial is always two tidy lines, its feature list is always three items of identical length. So you build something beautiful around a body that doesn't exist, and it fits perfectly, and it fits nobody.

Then the real copy shows up. The headline needs eleven words, because the product genuinely takes eleven words to explain. The best testimonial you have is a paragraph, not a pull quote. There's a proof point that deserves a section of its own and nowhere to put it.

Here's the same page, both ways:

One of those is a guess.

And once the guess has already been approved, everybody lands in the revision loop, trimming a true sentence to protect a fake layout. The thing that gets cut is always the argument.

Columns lose their integrity. Images have to get shrunk. Items don't always align. Some new artifacts have to be added to account for content that was not included. Text has to shrink. Buttons get pushed below the fold. The litany of things that go wrong trying to force copy into a design is... endless.

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So here's the version that works, and it has been sitting on your bookshelf your whole life.

An author writes the story. Just the story. There's no illustrator standing over their shoulder asking them to cut chapter four down so it fits a two-page spread. The story gets to be exactly as long as it needs to be.

Then the illustrator reads it and decides which moments need a picture. Not every page. The handful where an image carries something the words shouldn't have to carry alone.

Nobody illustrates a book that hasn't been written. It would be absurd.

That's the whole job, and it's a bigger job than it sounds like. Design isn't the story. Design decides what order the story arrives in, what gets emphasis and what gets cut, where the reader needs room to breathe, and which few moments earn a visual because a picture gets there faster than a sentence could.

Serving the message isn't the small version of design. It's the entire point of it.

Write it first. Then design the thing that carries it.

— Zach 😎