Making words matter
500ish words on how writing influences the way I design
Content is king. We live in the age of information overload and there’s literally consumable information seconds away from us each and every second of each and every day. Before Medium, I never really considered the implications of this information overload. Not once did I stop to consider the importance of how people communicate their messages but only focused on how I could make people listen to me. Not surprisingly my messages were being lost in the crowd.
Now for a student, a beginner in design, and novice in writing, I thought the essential way to make people listen to me and my messages was how my message looked. How the graphics portrayed my product or even how my product looked on that minimal slate to complement its minimal style. Minimal, minimal and erm… minimal.
I guess minimal as a style and communication technique is the trend us students have adopted as we haven’t opened pandoras box of visual communication techniques yet. Less is more, we see it everywhere but this is not the point I’m trying to make.
Writing makes designers think, I mean really think, before they post it online and this is directly feeding into all areas of my design work.
Since I started writing on Medium some 50ish posts ago, I have come to terms with a few lessons I have learnt from my mistakes when publishing projects or posting content. Yes, I have always had feedback but I don’t think until now I’ve ever considered feedback thoughtfully.
I’ve learned that messages should be communicated through a core value. Everything else in the message should be compared against that core value. Be it, paragraphs, titles and headers or how your product looks. The way in which this core value is communicated in different aspects of a piece of writing, brand, product or service becomes essential to how people digest the message in the content.
“When you say three things, you say nothing.”
I’ve seen this ‘core value’ in different forms since I realised how important it is. I’ve seen it as a message in a piece of writing. I’ve seen it as a particular insight from user testing. We all see it every day in every product we use and the message they want to communicate, you just have to take a moment to notice.
Writing has taught me that spending time on the content is much more important than spending time trying to make it look nice. I realise this is very contradicting when it comes to aesthetic of products but core values should be in the experience, not the aesthetic or form should do nothing but enhance experiences.
Yes, how to content is read, seen and reached are also all important factors but maybe we shouldn’t spend so long on this part? Thats why I chose Medium over Wordpress for a blog, Medium is all about delivering the best content you can.
I like to think I’m designing these posts on Medium. Designing to communicate my message by making words matter again. After all, we think of design as visual communication so why do we forget that words count too?
