It can feel like effective copy and effective design are at odds… Or at least frenemies. But they’re strongest together.
Design is a crucial part of catching eyeballs and stopping the scroll, and ultimately copy is what converts.
When working on a new marketing piece, finalize the copy before finalizing the design.
This order of operations ensures that the most important parts of your message remain, and prevents duplicate effort from designers or writers having to start over.
Here’s a real-life example of concurrently working on the design and copy parts of a campaign:
I’m writing the copy for a client’s services landing pages. I use the same organizational hierarchy for all the pages so it will be easy to use the same website template. The plan was for their website team to use the copy I wrote to design a layout and build the pages.
After the copy was finalized, it was discovered that the website team already finished the layout for the services page. Our options now are to:
- Shoe-horn the finalized copy into the layout, cutting out some important pieces of information the page should include.
- Re-write all the copy to make sense with the layout, essentially starting from scratch.
- Have the website team design a new layout for the services pages, trashing the work they’ve completed.
Whomp. Whomp.