What comes first, the content or the design? This is an argument you’ll hear across many teams. In an ideal world, a designer has real content so they have context for their design decisions. Before producing high fidelity mockups, you’ll have a rough idea of whether your navigation menu is going to have six items or 60 items. You’ll also know if your layouts need to handle a lot of text or give space to simple messaging.
If you don’t have real content and copy, copy is just a word for text content, at best, you’ll end up using Lorem Ipsum dummy text or placeholder stock images. At worst, you’ll waste time designing views that won’t exist, or picking an icon set that doesn’t have icons suitable for your menu items.
Okay, there’s probably a few legitimate situations where you don’t get real content before you start designing. Sometimes the content just isn’t ready yet, and you’ll have to get started regardless. Maybe you are building a design system or creating a theme, so your work needs to accommodate a variety of content and lengths of copy.
In these situations, it helps to work with some sample content to get an idea of the type of information hierarchy and tone. Maybe get some real heading text navigation items and key content mapped out, even if you don’t have all the text and labels planned. That way you don’t have to redesign everything later once you finally get hold of the real content, and most importantly, you’ll be able to focus on designing the best possible experience for the people using the end product.
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