Do designers write?

A year or so ago, I was having a chat with one of my friends. One thing lead to another in the conversation and then suddenly he asked me ‘Are you going to write or are you going to design?’ Confused by this binary choice provided, I blinked, gave my default poker face expression and moved on.

Later when I thought about it, I wondered why he asked this question. May be it was because he thought I am good with writing and not so good with my visual design skills? but can’t designers write as well? Why many designers are inhibited to writing? Why writing makes most designers wary? if not a great blog/ story, designers can write about good design, design that needs redesign, etc they can write about design and that won’t be writing?

A few weeks earlier, on a chat with a colleague he said ‘I don’t like writing mails. I am a designer’. And recently, I noticed an acquaintance browsing through some blogs. When asked if he writes too, he said that he preferred designing to writing.

Nobody asks — Do you design or do you drink water? If that sounds absurd to you, well that’s how absurd ‘Do you design or do you write’ sounds to me.

Writing email is not just about writing a mail. It’s about your clarity of your thought and communication. Can you write a mail and convince someone to take up an idea? Or can you write and make a great ad copy? Then that’s a skill worth working on.

Well, here’s a thought: Writing is not a ‘bad thing’ which will stop you from designing awesome stuff. Designing and writing are not binary choices. You can draw as well as write a good story. You can design as well as compose a great blog. You can design an app by composing a great copy for your application. You can design after writing down a clear list of your user’s aspirations, problems and the possible design solutions. You can design a nation by writing a book. You can design hundreds of people’s lives by writing a manifesto.

At the core of this ‘binary choice’ is the conflict between images and words. If you are good with images, you are not good with words. If you are not good with writing, may be you have great visual skills. Both these ideas need reconsideration; it’s an unconscious bias that’s been continued without much thought in the design community.

This conflict between words and images have a common ground. They are both about communication. Be it words or images, if you can communicate what you need/want to communicate, then your job is done. Also there are forms (comics and graphic novels) where words and images have co-existed happily for ages. When it comes to communication, it’s not just pretty images or well written words which are the only modes of communication. A well designed protest is also great design and great communication.

A great design, cracks both these fields. It will have great copy combined with great visual language. By great copy, I mean copy that clearly informs people about the whats, whys, wheres of the system. By great visuals, I mean a visual language that is appealing and communicates what needs to be communicated. (Did you notice, there’s ‘language’ in visual language?)

And writing is not just about writing. Writing represents clarity of thought. Once you write a few original, thoughtful thousand words about a design brief, it will be rare that you wouldn’t have got a grasp of the problem you are designing for. Writing helps in getting together your thoughts and views around a design. When you jot your ideas down, you will have more clarity to design for the problem in hand.

It’s not that designing and writing have been separate skill sets which has never been done together. Through the history of design, pioneers of design have done a great job of writing about design. Don Norman, Steve Krug and recently Jake Knapp have written about their design methods. There are designers on Medium who write well. Julie Zhou, John Saito are some of the names which come to my mind of people who write well in Medium. So it’s not entirely new for designers to write.

There are organizations which encourage good writing too. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has famously banned presentations and asks people to come with a 3 page report for meetings. They do that for a reason. Writing a 3 page report forces you to be clear about your idea that you are pitching.

Though designers are not ‘duty bound’ to write, it will be better if they write. They need to write to about their process, their issues, their challenges, the scenarios they are designing for, the solutions they are designing. With these writing they can leave a legacy of their thought process, their design methodology; if not anything, it is a great way for self expression for your ideas.

To sum it up, designing and writing are NOT binary choices. And you don’t have to choose only one of them. You can write and design; design and write. And you can do both well.

It’s not a question of OR, it’s a question of AND.

To writing AND designing well.