The Content Chicken and the Design Egg Problem

May 9, 2013

Designers and content owners do this little dance at the start of every project. Regardless of how many projects they’ve done or how well they know the design process, this always appears in the planning phase conversations.

Content and Design Loop - The Chicken and the egg problem

So which comes first?

Content and Design - The Chicken and the egg problem

Stuck in a content chicken and design egg loop?

Are you Team Chicken or Team Egg?

This is a Comic!

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  • WTFark

    HAA! Love it! I work for a radio group and we do this all the time. I have become pretty good at designing on the fly because of this. If I start designing and wait for content, most of the time I end up redesigning the piece. Plus, waiting saves me from having to explain lorem ipsum AGAIN.

  • Rebecca

    Team chicken!…with egg leanings.

  • Kris

    This is absurd. You can’t design for something if you have no content… Get me that damn content!

  • Evan

    Design egg!

  • Irune

    Team evolution. You get Team Chicken and Team Egg to make something that ressembles a first draft of a chicken and a first draft of an egg, and let the thing evolve until you have a chicken and an egg appearing simultaneously like it was magic.

  • Jared

    This is a dumb argument. 1. Concept 2. Design 3. Content

  • Nephanor of Fraal

    It’s simple, use garbage content till you have the design finalized. If that means random text, fine, at works. That’s how I design my websites, get the layout design made, fill it with content.

  • Crono

    get the content first, design is best shaped around content.

  • Nicole

    Content is NOT last. 99% of all website design scenarios: Client provides content outline (high level)…you design around this high level idea and provide design…client says it looks great…client begins drafting content then realizes that they need to change design here and there and everywhere to fit content ideas they had for a quote/blog/page/chart/header/footer/navigation menu/video/logo placement/sidebars/etc. etc.

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