The web is full of designers: visual designers, graphic designers, interaction designers, muppet designers.  I threw in muppet designers to see if you’re paying attention.

Designers on the web are experiencing a bit of a revolution that is summed up in a few words: measure everything.  Led by the likes of Google, every click, every eyeball movement is tracked to see what the user does next, all in an attempt to answer the question: what works best?

Design no longer is the purview of instinct and feeling; it has become more analytical.  My characterization here is crude and not wholly correct.  There are shades of gray, as instinct has its place and measurement can’t tell us everything.  Since I am not a designer, I’m not enmeshed in the design world and can’t speak to everything that happens.  I only follow along from the outside as a curious and interested spectator.

I don’t think most designers would argue that design has become more and more about measurements, conversions, and click through rates.  And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

However, all this focus has fallen in the visual design and user interaction arena.  One place that still gets neglected is that of copy design.  For those of you not aware, copy is the term used to refer to the written part of a website or a magazine, as opposed to the images and layout.

The web is more words than images, although Flickr and YouTube are doing their best to change that.  Day in and day out, you get around the web by reading.  It stands to reason that what the web says is as important as to how it looks.

Typography gets a lot of attention and for good reason, as fonts matter.  A font can catch your eye or set the mood.  Often fonts are compared using the pangram “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”.  This is great for evaluating the font, but if a font isn’t used to say anything, what use is a font?

Shouldn’t copy – what a website says – be given as much attention as how it looks?  Changing copy can quickly fix problems that otherwise would be difficult to deal with, as Joshua Porter shows.  Copy can affect conversion rates.  Dustin Curtis tweaked the words that pointed to his Twitter account and saw a measurable difference in click though rate: a 173% difference.

The design world already knows the work of Edward Tufte.  It should also know the work of his wife mother, Virginia Tufte. She wrote the book Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style.  It’s a book that does nothing except examine sentences.  The fact that this can be done speaks to the richness of language and suggests that we all should pay more attention to it.

So I ask: where are the copy designers?  I expect that over the next few years we’ll see them appear.  If they don’t appear explicitly, current designers will add copy design to their repertoire.

Words matter just as much as looks.  How much opportunity is your site passing over just because your copy lacks power or style?

Two sentences highlighted by Viginia Tufte in Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style:

I feel – and the anxiety is still vivid to me – that I might easily have failed before I began.
– V.S. Naipaul, Literary Occasions, 195

The desire to move on, to metamorphose – or perhaps it is a talent for being contemporary – was given to me as life’s inevitable and rightful condition.  To keep becoming, always to stay involved in transition.  It was all she and my father had ever known.
– Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life, 4

Thanks goes to Jason Rudolph for the conversation that sparked this post.