David and Company Blog

Sometimes, for a wide variety of reasons, a project will languish. The reasons may not even be known, if the powers that be choose not to share them. This — can you relate? — can cause frustration. Oh yeah! Frustration, however, can be counter productive to moving ahead as tempers can flare, egos can ascend and effective progress can spiral in the wrong direction. My strategy? Look for options.

We love our options. Not just me, all of us. Choices that can have the effect of making us feel productive, useful, even empowered. Maybe there’s a way to move the project ahead, with modifications. After all, sometimes there are good reasons why a project has lost steam, like a budget that is shrinking, or previously unknown problems with a product or a change of personnel. Options can breathe new life into a project, so before you give it up, consider the possibility that there may be a different way to move ahead than that previously planned. A lot of effort goes into these things and it would be a shame to throw it all away if there were a chance to save it.

If we improve the photography and the graphic illustration by asserting that the designed piece will be more effective with better art, is there anything else we could do to improve the piece even more? Yes, of course! The copy writing can be improved. Bringing this up at the beginning of a project is ideal. All too often though, the answer is that there isn’t enough money in the budget, or that so-and-so will be handling copy – they’re really good.

I don’t know, but I’d be willing to guess that your experience is a lot like mine, in that most of my clients supply copy and most of that copy could be improved. Unless you’re working for a larger company, who has the luxury of being able to afford copy writing or technical writing in-house, you will probably have to use copy written by someone whose primary job is something other than writing. Some of those people will be able to write some pretty good copy, but many won’t, so what do you do and how do you do it without offending anyone? (Feel free to chime in here anytime.)

My first step is usually to jump in as the copy editor, unofficially of course. Suggesting a change here, punctuation there, a word, a phrase, even a question like, “is that really what you mean?” can lead to improvements. But since this is acting in an unofficial capacity (and taking away from design time), naturally, I’m not getting paid for it. In the interest of helping my client and improving the effectiveness of the design, I do this and many of you probably do too. But I’d like to discover a better way. Particularly about ways to bring in professional copy writing. Any thoughts?