Designing with words : writing as design

Abstract

Writing for design has, over the past few decades, seen steady appreciation. Literature on design writing refers to it as a mostly technical vocation centred on the craft of writing in and of itself. Moreover, the suggestion seems to be that while writing is beneficial to, it is also distinct from the practice of communication design. Elsewhere, writing in the context of communication design is viewed as a specialisation – a skill that is typically reserved for a specialist writer who helps craft a tone to complement a predominantly visual design. In this article, we argue that writing for design is a far more complex and foundational skill for communication designers. In doing so, we explore the interdependence of narrative and writing, as a systematic design process and so highlight the importance of creative writing as design in an educational context and emphasise how integral writing is to the designer as a storyteller. To demonstrate this, we explore a selection of student work from an editorial project that has, for the past 21 years, been delivered to fourth-year Information Design students at the University of Pretoria (and which formed part of the 2023 Stories Worth Telling retrospective exhibition).