designwriting

Designwriting is the practice of producing textual content that explains, records, and communicates design work and its decisions. It accompanies visual artifacts such as sketches, wireframes, and prototypes and serves to make design processes legible to teammates, clients, and users.

Common forms include design briefs, rationale notes, design reviews, project reports, case studies, user guides, and documentation for design systems. It also spans design criticism, journalism, and scholarly writing about design.

Purposes and audiences: designwriting supports alignment among stakeholders, knowledge transfer, onboarding, accountability, and the preservation of a historical record. For users, it can inform product understanding when paired with interfaces and help ensure consistency across platforms.

Practices and methods include starting with goals and constraints, documenting decisions with rationale and trade-offs, timestamping iterations, integrating visuals and diagrams, writing for the intended audience, maintaining templates, and applying version control. Accessibility and clarity are essential, and the tone should be consistent with the brand.

Relation to other fields: designwriting overlaps with technical writing and UX writing and interacts with design research and product management. It can function as a bridge between creative output and organizational processes.

Education and career paths: designwriting is taught within design programs and practiced in professional settings. Roles include design writer, case-study author, documentation specialist, and content strategist within design teams.

Evaluation and quality: effective designwriting is judged by clarity, usefulness, and the traceability of design decisions to outcomes, ensuring that future work can build on documented rationale.