By Elena Reitman
Both create for humans
Designers and writers have a lot in common. The good ones delight and connect the audience to experiences and information they need. Both build maps and frameworks because the better the organization of the design or writing, the easier people can settle into it and relish a good pause of delight or reflection.
It takes empathy on the part of the writer and designer to create a rewarding experience, as well as some obsessing over the details of how things should be.
Readability is usability
Readability like usability makes a big impact on a writer’s success. Good writers make their work easy to read at the expense of their own time and effort. Simplification comes at a great cost in time. Conscientious writers know the harder the reader has to work to understand them, the less likely the work will spread.
Good design and writing takes a lot of effort, revision and letting go. Doing it. —Reviewing it. —Redoing it.
Designers and writers need editors to help evaluate and improve their work, and strong coping skills because a lot of the work is trashed.
Keep it simple
It’s possible to overdesign and overwrite. Simplicity is a sign of truth and mastery in writing and design. Master writers and designers don’t mask bad ideas behind complexity. Complexity is expressed in clear thoughts and analogies everyone (or at least an interested majority) can understand.
Observe the world
Some of the best writing is deeply sensory. And some of the best design tells a compelling narrative.
Writers and designers use the senses to absorb and discern what makes something significant or beautiful. Mastering writing and design means keeping your head down for a while to learn about contemporaries and masters in the respective fields.
Writing and design are strategic pursuits. Good writing and design require critical thinking, research, focus and editing. The work is not separate from social forces and constraints like money, time and opportunity.
Process
Good writing and good design depend on good process. Just as there may be many prototypes in the design of a product or a site, there need to be many drafts to complete a piece of writing. Prose has to be just as user friendly as a design prototype. Even for complex works, writers are constantly clarifying meaning for themselves and the reader. And that takes a lot of drafts.
Personality
Writers and designers tend to be at least mildly obsessive, brutally self-critical and are rarely happy with their work. Being half driven by intuition and imagination and half by mechanics and technical details makes for an interesting mind. But thinking both big and small can leave writers and designers, like many creatives, vulnerable. This is why a nurturing peer environment that welcomes mistakes is important.
Designers and writers have to be authentic, engaging, specific, concise and convincing. Readers and viewers won’t tolerate anything else.
Partners
Since the world is an interrelationship of words and objects, writers and designers need each other.
