HOW TO WRITE BAD COPY PART 2

Typo

Make your designer write it.

Calm down. Calm down. Yes, we know there are a lot of designers out there who love writing copy, coming up with headlines and inventing tag lines. And some of them are very good at it. But many aren’t.

So whilst it might seem like good sense (not to mention save money) to make your designer come up with the copy for your latest ads or for your website, secretly, I can tell you, they hate you for it. Designers are just half of the creative process and if you make them do all of it, that’s where your trouble starts.

1              Designers are great at designing

You know what’s coming next, don’t you? Yes. And designers aren’t always great writers. Lots of designers are brilliant conceptualists, some are amazing layout specialists, others get all sexy over typefaces whilst a few, it must be said, love to talk in code. But many are just not cut out for writing. We have worked with many designers who end up having to do their own copy. It’s not the thing that drives them. So they don’t care about it as much as a copywriter will. How many designers do you know who will relish a copy conundrum? How many will push the words around until they fit in the right order, but only when they have been tried in every possible order? How many designers will die in a ditch over good grammar? Not many. Whether your on camera or you’re on camera is up to you. Only a copywriter will sit down and refuse to move unless you change it to the right way (in much the same way a designer feels about white space).

2              If your heart’s not in it, how will the love flow?

Poetic, eh? But it’s a fact. If you don’t care about what you do then you won’t put your heart and soul into it. If you are made to do it then you’ll do it begrudgingly. You’ll also accept second best, simply because it’s a solution. It may not be the best solution but at least it answers the brief. And, in our book, accepting second best is about taking the quickest route to the answer. In the copywriting world that means resorting to clichés, over used words and phrases and cheap puns. There’s only one possible outcome. Bad copy.

3              The designer is just half of the story

Not all work requires copy, granted. And lots of great work gets done without the help of a copywriter. But there’s a reason for advertising agencies putting designer and writers together in creative teams. Designer and writers think differently. They complement each other with their disciplines. A boring ad can come to life with great copy and a dull headline can sing in the capable hands of an eloquent designer. It’s the creative process. I speak from personal experience. The one thing I miss about agency life since I started Copy Monkey is working day in day out with ‘my’ designer.  There is something special about collaboration that is hard to mimic in isolation. You can’t do everything. I wouldn’t expect anyone to make me design an ad. I’d do it badly. So why the other way around?

4              Writing has changed

Thankfully, writing has changed. The internet has made sure of that. The way we write has had to evolve, and along with it, our skill set has had to expand to take in content development, blogging and micro blogging. And we still need to be good at the other stuff too.

Google has influenced us more than we know. But, happily, good sense prevails when it comes to what Google likes. Quality of content is now holding its own against the devil of keyword density. Thank goodness then, that the keyword stuffers are having to find their creative side. Internet users want content – and masses of it – but they also want good content. No one wants to read a list any more. No one wants to attempt to read copy that’s badly written, thrown together or only serves some higher ranking purpose. Of course, you have got to find it to read it but there’s a fine balance. And getting it right takes skill. I don’t profess to understand it completely – I’ll leave that to the SEO people – but I know that I need to know enough to write great copy that the search engines will love too. It’s a dance. And we, as writers, love doing it. In much the same way as your designer loves to make it look amazing. Because that’s what he does.

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