What comes first: content or design?

A question often debated in the content world is what should be done first: content or design.

The answer? Both.

The resounding answer is to engage both the copywriter and designer at the same time. In fact, if they can work together on the project that’s even better. The problem that can arise if you engage one before the other is that either the copywriter creates copy that makes it difficult to design around, or the designer creates a layout that copy either doesn’t fit into, or there’s far too much space.

Design and content can work together to create a plan for what the end result will look like. With both parties being able to contribute to the end result, all of the skills for a truly customer-first approach will be considered. Accessibility, readability, and brand awareness will all be incorporated.

Both parties will be able to get on with their work with an informed approach and less resistance. There will always be tweaks and alterations needed as each party runs into limitations, but they can discuss together the best way to tackle these.

A great example of when to engage content and design at the same time is when you’re planning a website migration. There’s going to be a lot of rewriting and there’s also going to be brand-new templates to design. Don’t make the mistake of asking content to write everything and then make a designer work around that. And don’t ask design to make all the templates without working with content to ensure they’ll be able to abide by any design restrictions.

But not all the time …

An example of when design and content don’t need to be engaged together is when they’ve already created a template together. Think of an eDM. It doesn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel every time you want to send an eDM.

Ideally, get content and design together to create an eDM template that can be reused in the future. They’ll both be able to advise on their expertise, like brand, readability, attention span, structure, and where to put the call to actions. And then once that’s done, content can be briefed alone in the future to create the copy for the eDM template agreed upon by both parties.

This is the same with social media content. If content and design can work together on the imagery and theme they want, then design can collate folders of imagery that’s suitable, or create quote templates that content can tweak on an as-needed basis. There’s no need to engage both parties for every single output in the future.

Moral of the story

Work that requires a designer and a content creator shouldn’t be briefed in silos. Get both parties in the room as early as you can in any project. You’ll increase productivity, the speed at which you can deliver results, and you may just walk away with some handy templates for future use.