I picked up a great quote from the Refresh The Triangle meeting the other night:

"Copy is the easiest and often cheapest thing to fix." - Jeffrey Zeldman

This really got me thinking about the role that copy plays in design. I often find myself leaving copy till the end, almost an afterthought, and rush to get something up to "fill the space" so I can go ahead and launch. This is pretty evident in the front page of 22books, I can definitely write a more compelling mantra for the site then what I tossed together hours before going live.

I think this problem is best represented by the use of lorem ipsum text. Designers often use lorem ipsum text to fill in the parts of a design where the customers copy should go. The idea behind this is that using real text would distract you from the design, and lorem ipsum is gibberish for most of us. (wikipedia has an interesting history and examination) The problem is that this obviously is pushing the task of writing this copy to the very end where it will be shoe-horned into the rest of the design. Don't have enough text to fill up the space? Then you either end up with a poor design or text that rambles and rambles to fill space. This is the same problem with using pre-defined site templates.

I am working on a re-design of The Lounge and I am going to make the first step coming up with the copy and what I want to get across, then build the design around that copy.

The text of your site is arguably the most important part of your site, leaving it to the end is a bad idea.

-James