I can write copy.
Oh no.
Oh yes.
Mind you, it’s not great copy. I won’t be stealing anyone’s job. I can write headlines that don’t make the writers cry, occasionally even a good one. I’m not skilled at pulling well-formed thoughts out of the air, but if I have enough examples of brand copy to look at, I can cobble something together. I’m a crude organic ChatGPT that contributes occasional bits of social copy and digital ads for client brands.
I’m not a copywriter. I art direct, I design, I copysketch.
You can write copy.
Oh no.
Oh yes.
Do you need to? No. Should you want to? It depends. Are you a visual creative with ambitions of having an alphabet soup title? Do you hope to go full-time freelance or start your own single person agency? Then yeah, it might be a good idea. Most design also includes some words.
But people don’t expect writers to be designers or photographers or illustrators or ??? True, but when the wordfolk get alphabet soup titles, people also expect more of them too. By that point, they’ve worked with the art side of creative enough to understand visual things, develop a sense of taste, have opinions, and have ideas that aren’t limited to copy.
Where do you learn to write copy?
Reading stuff about writing copy.
I only read two books so far: Dan Nelken’s A Self-Help Guide for Copywriters and the third edition of Copywriting: Successful Writing for Design, Advertising, and Marketing. I found them both incredibly helpful for showing real ad copy executions with the reasons why they are effective or not, writing exercises, and other thoughts about the role of the written word in advertising and marketing. I also follow some people on social media, but that’s a mixed bag and a topic to talk about another day.
Seeing copy everywhere.
It’s in your feed, it’s on every screen, it’s outside, it’s in the store, it’s even in your ears (somebody wrote the script for that ad you skipped). You’re probably designing around it and with it every day. There’s probably something about tone or voice, maybe even editorial style in the brand books you look at, but passed over because it’s about words and not colors or icons. Some designers don’t read what they’re working with, copy is just a shape to fit in a composition. Some care about the typography and read enough of the content to make decisions. Some read it. All of it. I’m one of those. I learned a lot from reading what the person I work with writes. As I paid more attention to it, I started noticing it more all around me. Copy is still mysterious, but I see parallels to design and now recognize some patterns and structures.
Your other half.
No, not your lover (although for some visual creatives their writer is their partner beyond work), but I mean the writer(s) you work with or report to. You can ask them questions. You can ask them why. Not every person will want to answer everything, but I have been blessed with many wordsmiths in my professional and personal life that humor my curiosity. You can also cause them pain by sharing examples of terrible copy seen in the wild and they’ll tell you why these words caused them mental damage. Sharing witty copy causes less grief and often results reasons why it’s brilliant.
You write it yourself.
Theory only gets you so far. Sometimes you need make words even though it’s not your job (I’ll get into that more next), sometimes you’ll have an idea. I have lots of absurd ideas and make a lot of silly fake ads or memes to make my writers laugh. I like making them laugh. I’m pretty sure the only reason I got halfway okay at writing headlines was from all the shitpost ads I make as jokes or during concepting.
When should you write copy?
Brainstorming.
Concepting is a great time to throw words out there. Don’t worry if they’re good. No one expects art to make great copy, so don’t feel shy about sharing. Everything you come up with could be absolute garbage, but the writers might get an idea out of it anyway. You might even come up with something great.
When design leads the project.
Sometimes words come first, sometimes design comes first, sometimes copy and art is a simultaneous beautiful mess. It depends on the project, it depends on the timeline, but if the design half is the start then there’s going to be dummy copy, maybe some lorem ipsum with a big fat FPO across it. But headers and subheaders can be a place for real words, for context. Again, they don’t have to be amazing headlines, but you’re giving your writer or someone reviewing your work a hint about what’s happening in a layout. Sometimes your headlines or CTAs will make it through unchanged and you get to feel good about putting together words that made the cut.
You had an idea.
A line popped into your head that you think might work. Write it down. You had a whole idea that was both copy and art. Write it down and make a sketch or throw it together. It happens. You’re part of a team. Share the concept and see where it goes.
Alt text.
Depending on your workplace, visual creatives might be responsible for writing the alternate text to describe images and videos. I like this explainer from Harvard because it’s about alt text for accessibility rather than alt text for SEO.
Why you should write copy:
I’m finally getting to the point, the title of this blog post, the punchline!
You should learn to write copy because it’s another creative discipline and you will learn something from it. There’s no need to become an expert, but a little general knowledge is helpful in collaboration, in providing or receiving feedback, in coming up with ideas. You probably wouldn’t question learning photography or lettering as much as a suggestion to learn writing. We all write, every day, but copy is different and specific and a huge part of our experiencing media, so if you’re in the industry, you’re doing yourself a disservice by not trying to understand it.
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