Content before design. Please!

by Susan Cowan

If you’ve been involved in a web project, as either client or developer, you might have seen design concepts produced early in the project ‘just to get a sense of what it will look like’.

As a web strategist I strongly recommend against this. Why?

All good design requires constraints and boundaries and a clear understanding of the ‘job’ the design has to do. Not only is it impossible to design something successfully without boundaries or constraints. It’s also impossible to judge design unless we understand what ‘job’ the design is meant to do. Without an understanding of the objective of a design, both designer and client get lost in the black hole of ‘personal taste’. There is no way out of that.

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