Do Words Still Matter?

As Oxford dictionary has chosen emoji as its “word” of the year, many opinions have been aroused. Critics declared the death of the written word and advocates argued emojis are now a part of our communicative fabric.

No wonder, in design world, many design clients are usually more concerned with the imagery used on their website than the words. In fact, they can easily spend hours just to make decisions while leave copy decisions to the last minute. This is a massive mistake; words are also a design issue.

Words VS Images

If you design for a website, you will commonly face two basic forms, text and image. A website designer should provide a platform for users to get engage through content. A website with no images would look out of place in today’s world and the inventive use of imagery is a tried and tested method to improve the user exprindly emoji, erience. Just like our friendly emoji, visual information and images are used to convey a myriad of thoughts and emotions to make users engage with your content.

Moreover, images are easier to be memorized rather than text, therefore it is very good to attract the audience’s attention and guide the user’s line sight while text will give explanation of the context behind the image. Once the text is added to an image, the user’s inherent desire is being manipulated. Providing images only will also bring you a handful of downsides to image-only sites, not least the lack of context, but also the load issues due to increased weight and the lack of SEO impact.

Images may be important for making an impactful first impression, but the textual content is also important for websites. Textual content can give audience specific information, such as who you are, what you stand for, all about your business or product and what makes you special. This is something that a single image just could not do.

Therefore, the two must coexist within the world of web design, since words without images do not engage users while images without words confuse users.