Fast Co: From Google Ventures: 5 Rules For Writing Great Copy.
Great tips! Good clear writing is the key.
Google: People are often surprised when I tell them writing is a design skill. I used to work with an excellent visual designer who hated being called a visual designer. His defense was, “Isn’t all design visual?” Well, no. Most of our design work is expressed visually, but we use design to figure out all sorts of things: What a product does, how it works, and what it says. The last one–what our products say to the people who use them–continues to surprise me as one of the most important things we need to decide as designers.
At Google Ventures, my partners and I get to try different approaches to design all the time–we work with different startups every week. As a writer and designer, my approach is to focus on writing great copy and use basic visual design to highlight the most important parts. Daniel Burka recently wrote about how my visually unsophisticated (it’s okay, you can say “ugly”) prototypes often perform well in user research–regularly beating out beautiful, polished, sexy prototypes.
We think this is pretty amazing–and no one is more amazed than me! Curious, I started collecting tips and guidelines that help me design solutions that are clear and easy to understand. Here are five of my principles for great interface copywriting.
Clarity is King
Personality Doesn’t Matter
Just Tell Me
People Do Read (concise, well-designed copy with plenty of white space)
Writing is key in the design process
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Chez Froggie 