Published: June 17, 2016
A Conversation I have with Nearly Every Designer
Stop me if this sounds familiar - "the website is not the same as the designs"!
Day 1)
Wireframes for new design have arrived
Day 2)
Me: All these titles have only five words in them.
Designers: We're going to train the client to have short titles.
Me: The maximum number of characters in any title you have is 5. Will all titles be less than 25 characters.
Designers: We'll train them for short titles.
Me: The client's name alone is more than 5 words.
Designers: We'll train them to use an acronym so it will only be one word.
Me: Have you looked at their existing content that we have to migrate? Some news posts have titles that are over 20 words long. What will we do with those?
Designers: We'll be working with their internal team to make titles shorter.
Day 50)
The designs have arrived
Day 51)
Me: I see in the designs that you have titles running to two lines and truncated. Is this supposed to happen?
Designers: Yes. If titles are longer than the space allocated, we will use ellipses.
Me: It's a pity no one thought of the idea that titles may be longer than five words before this was designed.
And remember:
Truncation is not a content strategy. pic.twitter.com/sMfVCWUGJV
— Scarin’ M’Braaaaaain (@karenmcgrane) October 10, 2014