Wolf’s Little Store

We’re in the business of designing, but more often than not we’re also in the dirtier business of making templates. The majority of projects we work on (in terms of quantity) are informational websites. So making templates you say? What do you mean?

It’s very rare for a client to have samples of content in their deliverables. By deliverables I mean copy, photographs, illustrations, logos and other files that might help the designer build a fitting website. When this problem comes up as the subject in a conversation between designers, you could probably hear the sighing from a respectable distance. Which is a fancy way of saying that I’m not the only one with this problem - it’s an age old one, but it seems to be at it’s high point now.

A general rule of thumb for deliverables is: give the designer everything that might come in handy. If you’re the editor of a magazine and you’re using a very specific set of typefaces, deliver those along with the project. If you don’t have the license for them, at least give the designer the font names so he can search for a viable alternative.

The bigger the client, the better the deliverables. Bigger clients have had design work done before and tend to have a number of files ready to be sent - for example theirs and other relevant logos in vector format, professional photographs of their offices and whatnot, and the odd illustration.

In the worst case the client has absolutely nothing. If the project involves logo design and establishing a look for the company this is not a problem. A startup company can’t possibly have all the assets that a designer would need - and they shouldn’t. If they are an established company, this is definitely a problem. Then again, it’s also the task of the designer to find more material if what is delivered is not suitable enough. It might not meet quality standards. But clients are sure not helping themselves by neglecting the task of making a selection of the available material and delivering it in a neat package. Digital, that is.

Most clients do pretty well in delivering assets, but one part is consistently lacking: content. Oh, you say, that problem is easily solved: throw in some Lorem ipsum and you should be fine.

No. Lorem ipsum doesn’t accurately represent the content of a website. It represents long paragraphs of running text in a novel. But not web writing - not at all. If you’re designing without content, you’re decorating. You’re building a frame for the content to sit in. While it should be reversed: start from the content and make it fit. Have an illustrator draw a witty picture (A List Apart) based on your article’s content, look for a suitable photo and caption it appropriately (Andy Rutledge).

This, of course, is not viable. Not always. Imagine the New York Times did a custom design for each of the news articles on their website. Templates have always existed, and are needed. But the difference here is that the designers of the New York Times know what they are designing:

• An article of 800 to 1200 words. Running text with a full width photo.
• Magazine preview. Running text, 2 side photos. 8 pages.
• Photo gallery of 14 photos with side commentary.

The list could go on. The point is that if I have no content, I have no clue what the client is going to do with their website. Are they going to have long or short pages? Lots of headings and subheadings, or long passages of running text? Are they going to need to display tabular data? Photo’s? Which format? Size? Quantity?

So we try to write flexible CSS that accounts for most possible styles. But to get to the next level in web design, we’re going to need a shift from templating to actually designing the content. And if that’s not viable, the least we can do is sit down with the client and make some real decisions. I can imagine a conversation like this:

We have three types of articles. The first ones are short blurbs of content relevant to us [what we do] on the web. These blurbs will consistently be small bits of text with one to three links at the end. Next there’s the blog post style articles, where we write 200 to 500 words, complete with a little captioned illustration or photograph, consistently aligned right. The last type of articles are the ones we also publish in printed form. These have large professionally taken photos, an introduction, the article (which can span several pages in print form) with a note about the author at the end.

Then design based on those decisions. Designing is not about building pretty frames but honoring the content.

• Category: articles
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