Design and copy - joined at the hip?

After seeing some particularly poor copy writing at one of my clients, I asked the head of digital marketing politely if I could pitch for his copywriting business.  "No", came the reply, "Design and copy should be done together by our creative agency."

Of course he was right, and yet he was so wrong.

His creative agency was not designing and copy writing as part of a unified process. Each task was done independently and the results were somehow mashed together to produce poorly worded, design-compromised work.  In my opinion the designer spent her time drawing pretty pictures that were way off message and the copy writing was done by an English graduate looking for work experience.

Also, the majority of the briefs coming out of his department are for EITHER copy writing OR design - a new banner (95% design), a new web page in a standard template (100% copy writing).

In a perfect world, the copy writer and designer would sit side by side, but in reality they don't. The designer produces a nice looking template with "Ipsem Lorem" all over it, while the copy writer writes words that will never work in the template.

So what's the answer? Of course you can't do much with a poorly thought-out brief, but once you have that, the copywriting takes the lead. If a concept is going in the wrong direction, it will look bad in words way quicker than it looks bad in pictures. From my point of view, writing the copy in a simple wireframe (a table in Microsoft Word usually suffices) and reference to the customer's style guide ensures that a lot of the constraints of the design are taken into account. And the rest is good open dialogue.

The head of marketing may want his design agency to do both jobs for reasons of commercial accountability, and that's fine, but I can't help feeling he'll never get quality results.