Content and Design

It’s really interesting, design. I know very little about it, but I do know that print and web design are often compared to each other in all the wrong ways. Print design is static; web design is dynamic.

One of the really interesting misconceptions about web design is that the content doesn’t matter until later on. I’ve fallen into that trap, and it’s resulted in a superb number of stuff-ups. Entire designs with no insight as to what’s going to be squeezed into them are churned out all the time and they usually work okay, but the second you decide to do something outside of the box, you’ve got problems.

You can’t design a web site, based on assumptions on what’s going to be displayed on it.

Lorem Ipsum is a great tool for filling a space with words. If you’re interested in more than just that blob of text though, you’ll need to work with some actual prose; Work out the importance of sentences, paragraphs and words before coming up with styles.

It’s also a lot easier to experiment with typography if you’ve got something to go on. You can’t get a feel for what will work font-wise if you haven’t got some quality content to deal with. Additionally, “Lorem Ipsum dolor sit amet” might look great in 12pt Comic Sans, but not at the end of the development process when you finally change it to read “Foo Corporation Pty Ltd”.

Another thing to consider with web design is that it’s not just the design that counts. You’ve got multiple pages, and a whole suite of tools to mark up your content with meaning. Not only is it impossible to intelligently apply semantics to lipsum text, you’ll likely end up with a whole host of redundant styles when you finally convert your design to CSS.

The design phase is also a good time to lay out your navigation logically. There’s nothing more frustrating than coming up with a menu hierarchy that looks good on paper, only to find out later that there’s not enough content to fill it. We can work around these issues as web designers, but only if we know about them beforehand.

That said, coming up with content is a daunting task, that clients really don’t like doing. The way I see it, there’s three scenarios that can play out.

1. The customer comes up with masses of quality content for us to work with, at the beginning of the process, with no problems.
2. The customer comes up with minimal, low quality content, after being coerced into doing so upon pain of cattle prod.
3. The customer hires a third party (such as us) to proof a minimal amount of quality content. After all, we’re the ones with the web experience, and know in most cases what the target audience is likely to want.

Either way, there’s absolutely no way a quality design can come out of thin air. We need to stand our ground and explain that content is an important part of the development process, and guide our clients along the way to good semantic design.