I’d like to start this article by quoting one of my favourite authors.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
Compelling stuff, isn’t it? We’ve all been there, you’re creating a lovely new site and when the content finally gets over to you it’s far too wordy to fit into any of the nicely spaced boxes you’ve created and it’s going to make the site look terrible. Content writers just don’t understand, right? Wrong.
I’ve worked as a User experience team of one for a few years now, and my biggest pain point has always been writing copy and having to design without content. I’ve quite regularly been in a position where I need to turn to marketers or editors to provide the copy for certain sections in order to cover my own back and for a long time, it meant I had big chunks of my design using placeholder content making feedback session quite difficult. Smaller projects, and especially website projects suffer so much by not having content completely embedded within the design process.
The problem
A more traditional design process is to gather requirements, put a design together and then have a developer build it. For projects that allow more space to work with will break this down further into wireframing stages to better understand site structure and page layout before getting into the nitty-gritty of design.