Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

These days many designers can code—an increasingly important skillfor landing a job. But few are just as fluent in their own language as they are in Javascript. That presents a serious problem in terms of design. Users still depend on copy to interact with apps and other products. If designers don't know how to write well, the final product—be it a physical or digital one—can suffer as a result.

In his "2017 Design in Tech Report," John Maeda writes that "code is not the only unicorn skill." According to Maeda, who is the head of computational design and inclusion at Automattic and former VP of design at VC firm Kleiner Perkins, words can be just as powerful as the graphics in which designers normally traffic. "A lot of times designers don't know that words are important," he said while presenting the report at SXSW this weekend. "I know a few designers like that—do you know these designers out there? You do know them, right?"

By pointing to writing as the next most important skill for designers, the report suggests a corrective to an overreliance on the interface—to the extent that writing itself has been left behind as a design skill. "A core skill of the interaction designer is imagining users (characters), motivations, actions, reactions, obstacles, successes, and a complete set of 'what if' scenarios," writes designer Susan Stuart, in a blog post highlighted in the report. "These are the skills of a writer — all kinds of writers, but particularly fiction, screenwriting, and technical writing."...