Time To Stop Lorem Ipsuming
Lorem Ipsum has consumed our creative juices. It’s time to stop.
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Lorem Ipsum has been the print industry’s standard dummy text for at least five centuries by some unknown printer. It was popularized in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets and, in the last decades, by desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker. But I’ve about had it! Designers, Lorem Ipsum makes your brain lazy.
Designers relied on Lorem Ipsum to fill up their beautiful design interfaces. I’ve dealt with design projects where I see designers showing me designs with nice bells & whistles but very little substance. I hired designers based on their portfolio—most coming fresh from great design programmes—which showed great promise of creative ideas and executions. However, a lot of designers fell into the rut of daily designer’s deliverables: They came up with great designs, tackle the creative challenges as far as interfaces go, but fell short in embodying the brand they are designing for.
Some of you may ask “So what?” and here’s my answer:
Words are a great passion of mine. I was one of those designers who think beautiful designs will allow me to express the brand, and until I get the content from the client, FPO will do. And that isn’t just limited to images. It affects copy too. Then I found that the client gave me the copy from their existing website. And it’s crap. So I ended up where I started. That’s when I realized that design has to be jump-started with the right copy.
A lot of web designers in today’s generation do not have the experience of working in the “old school” form of creative environment: Ad firms, where you sit in the room for hours and came up with the right taglines, the right keywords, the right “feel” for the brand. I was lucky to be briefly involved in one where I learned that words are a powerful thing.
Words make you form an idea, a state of mind, a brand. As a starting designer a decade ago, I often came up with fun filler copy to get a chuckle out of the clients, which was a bonus because most of the time it came from my research efforts to understand the client more. Mind you, this was the day before every brand had a website. I found that the research helped me understand the brand better and by writing my take on it, made my design better and my client happy.
With that in mind, as years go by and my responsibility greater, I started writing the copy for website contents to help my designers come up with the right design, starting from the smallest design elements. And it helps.
With a creative brief, my designers see what the client wants after we aligned and realigned their brand presence. However, creative briefs often left a big hole in “What should the website really say?” department. It may be the smallest details, but for the client, every little things matter. And it should.
We, as the creative agency, should be the one responsible for helping the client shape their brand. The right word, the right call to action, the right user experience.
I often sit at my desk, hunkered down, reading lines and lines of the client’s brand documents, doing environmental scan and researching what is said about them. And that helped spark that little spot in my brain that made me go, “Ooh! This is what we should be doing!” And that’s not an image or a color or a page layout. It’s a few words forming the right positioning for the brand. And that makes a heck of a difference. The right positioning makes your client know you’re thinking and breathing their brand, and that you are being their advocate. I’ve had a client who loved a section name we came up with in the first design round. He was so happy he used the word “love.” That’s when you know you got it right.
So go ahead. Write something. Write something great. It’s worth your while.
p.s.: However, if you HAVE to use Lorem Ipsum (sigh…), you can find some options here. Don’t forget to check out Gangsta Lorem Ipsum if it fits your personality better.