Here at Portland Design Co we work with clients on a huge range of projects, from designing websites from scratch to helping think through all aspects of brand and identity development. So when do we need content for each of these? Well, the answer is, it depends!

When we design websites, having the content ahead of time helps us to craft sites that highlight the most important information. That’s the purpose of good graphic design: elevating a message to increase its impact. Here’s an example from a website we designed for Solotoff Law:

Ari provided us with a comprehensive draft of copy for his entire Solotoff Law website up front, so we knew that he had a long list of practice areas within his entertainment & intellectual property law practice. In order to keep the site clear and organized, we designed a set of custom icons for his website to act as an easy visual index on the homepage.

We were also able to design clean drop-down menus to hold all the significant information his prospective clients need, as shown below. This design keeps pages from being to text-heavy, and also provides an intuitive way for clients to zero in on the answers they need immediately, without having to skim a lot of text.

In other cases, like with the City of Portland’s Stay the Course COVID-19 public health information campaign, our clients needed the ability to create ongoing branded content in-house as material was developed. They gave us very general guidance about what they wanted to show, and to make it easy for them to stay on-brand, we created a blank Canva template and sample mock-up for their social media posts, complete with instructions for adding their own content.

It can sometimes be challenging for designers to explain why we need content up front, but determining what content is needed and when is a huge step toward creating powerful designs. For clients and prospective clients: it’s important for you to know that our requests for content are always in service of providing you with effective designs that can increase your impact. And for fellow designers: take the time to explain to your clients why having content can make such a huge difference in the finished product.

Was this helpful? We’d love to hear from you! Leave us a comment or send us a note at info@portlanddesignco.com. Thanks for reading!