We’ve all been talking about the trend toward content-driven design (that is, design in which the writing, messaging, videos, photos and related data—not the technology or look & feel—are considered first) lately, and for two good reasons:

The first is, it makes sense. You can’t write a paper without a thesis or paint a picture with any subject matter. Likewise, it’s a bad idea to design a website with no ‘thesis’ or ‘actual content’. Otherwise, it has been said, you are making a decoration and not designing.

The second is, what started as an industry trend has blossomed into a bona fide discipline that agencies, businesses and freelancers are taking seriously. Tons of cities in the US and beyond have content strategy meetups now, content strategy conferences are popping up everywhere, and who knows how many content strategist-web writer-IA-designer hybrids join our ranks monthly.

And take a look at this year’s SXSW Interactive’s PanelPicker, where more than 50 submissions are categorized under Content—not including all those content-related panels moonlighting as Design Thinking, User Experience or Social Media.

Content is on like the break of dawn.

Content and The Design Agency

And yet, from a design agency’s or client’s perspective, there is much to be taught and learned. After all, the approach to content-driven design that works for big enterprise-y projects won’t typically work for smaller ones. What works for a landing page or microsite won’t work for brochureware or a web app.

Making matters more difficult is the fact that most clients aren’t aware of this trend, much less our daily #contentstrategy machinations. What seems obvious to us in our lofty Technology Tower doesn’t always resonate with the people who pay us for our expertise.

All of this accounts for why I think it’s important for design agencies—not just content strategy people—to keep churning on this topic of content-driven design, sharing their insights and advice all the while. Maybe we’ll find new words to describe and ways of thinking about what we’re doing. Web design is still new after all, and there are approaches eagerly waiting to be thunk up.

Our SXSW Panel

With that in mind, I invite those of you who think about these things to take a look at the SXSW interactive panel we’ve submitted for 2011: Design, Meet Content: Exploring Content-Driven Design. It’s about this very topic, and it will involve a designer (my husband and business partner at thingsthatarebrown) + a content strategist (myself) talking about the mechanics of weaving good content and strategy into the web design process. We’ll use a few of our recent projects and some others as case studies. We’ll get specific. There might be joking.

If it looks good to you, we’d appreciate the vote.

Others’ Panels

And finally, there are about a million awesome-looking proposals in the mix this year, the most shiny of which I’ve included in a SXSW Panel Roundup on the thingsthatarebrown blog. Review them and get happy.

Designer Frank Chimero talks about fighting to maintain high standards, even when your rich multi-national clients will pay more for an ice sculpture than for a logo. Foodie blogger Molly Wizenberg of Orangette talks about fighting against your beliefs about what you should do, and allowing yourself to change directions.

Any person who gets paid for doing creative work is bound to find herself hamstrung, from time to time, in that strange no-mans land where our work lives—somewhere between art, engineering and commerce.

Do we follow self-expression at the expense of profit? Do we make money at the expense of thoughtfulness? Do we become great engineers, only to regret not pursuing a more artful path later on down the line? Arrive at these questions with grand expectations about the purity of your art, or the thoroughness of your approach, and you will be disabused.

The reality is this: Not everyone cares about the design you made. Not everyone cares how great you are. Coming to terms with this is a cornerstone of client work, and it’s only natural to experience an occasional internal struggle.

But let’s not quit our jobs and join WWOOF just yet. There may be a tootsie-roll center to our angst.

Despite what Spartans bark, I’m convinced that our existential crises serve a purpose. We complain about clients because we’re trying to learn how to better serve / deal with them. We complain about losing creativity because we want to stay creative. We complain about sitting and staring at computers because we don’t want the whole country to die of Office Ass.

The struggle is a by-product of trying to move forward. We can’t move forward, though, unless we’ve assessed the situation, identified problems and devised some solutions. Since most of us work privately and can’t see one another’s workflow, voicing our frustrations is one of the best places to begin. To see what’s working for our peers, and what doesn’t. This goes beyond ‘relatability’ and ‘transparency’—collective self-disclosure helps us get stuff done.

And so I say: Let yourself fall into despair or elation from time to time, and feel free to publicly announce it. Take it outside. Fight it out.

Yes We Can

The 4-hour workweek and Purple Cow are NYT booklist best sellers. Gary Vaynerchuck, Seth Godin and Tim Ferris are internet sensations. Millions of people—including arugula-eating elitists like myself—buy their books.

“Hope” might explain why Tim Ferris can convince us that we can achieve success in 4 hours a week. We want to believe. Because, what if? What if I really could crush my purple cow in four hours a week and make a million dollars and be happy?

This aspirational thinking and pumping ourselves up are pretty adaptive—they make us aim higher and push our limits. Like when you were little, for example, and wanted to be on star search, and jumped off the roof for practice. Maybe you didn’t end up on star search, but did you learn how to take a fall like a man? Yes we can.

Of course, getting yourself amped over any one idea comes at a cost. Because in exactly 2 seconds you will land on the ground. And when you do, your knees will kill.

Beware Populist Propaganda!

Self-help business books may be aesthetically problematic. But the real problem is that they reduce the complexities of “being successful” to a single (marketable) thesis. Nothing is ever that simple.

For most people, there is no magic bullet for success, beyond persistence, resilience, intelligent risk-taking and riding inspiration when it hits.

Plus, it takes years of hard work to nail it in 4 hours a week. And it takes sacrifices in other areas of your life to CRUSH IT. And purple cows only get you so far.

Post Script: Actually, maybe there IS a magic bullet. Read Get Businessing.

I mean, I like it. I like seeing what other people are doing. I like knowing there’s a great sea of people just like me, trying to succeed via business.

But the effects of collective peeking—that we can all see each other’s work and personal lives, all the time—are odd.

Peeping Toms and NorCal

There’s a strange sense of comfort (look how open and transparent—and human!—we all are!), mixed with a low-grade anxiety (look how much more open, transparent, and human X’s life/company is than mine!) that comes with x-ray vision.

It’s weird. And it’s no wonder some people refuse to join Twitter and Facebook. They turn all but the most confident of us into slobbery peeping toms.

While driving up the coast of Northern California recently, Matt and I stopped at a bed and breakfast. It was late and the inn manager was the only one there, so we drank and talked with her for a while.

She’d moved from tiny little city to tiny little city throughout the years, and now she and her four kids live in Westport. Population: 200.

She said she hated being in big cities. Hated feeling insignificant, hated racing around against people essentially the same herself. Hated thinking her kids might grow up where everyone’s looking at everyone else’s paper.

I kept thinking she’d never make it as a web designer. And I felt her pain.

I Know What You Did Last Summer

The miracles of social media allow me to know what about 100 people who I’ve never met like to drink. I know when they’ve had a bad day. I know if they have kids, and what parenting style they’re into. Their little humany quirks.

I also know what exciting projects they’re working on, how other people respond to their work and how much more or less successful, attractive and artistic they are than me.

This transparency has some very good effects. It’s easier to get to know one another, learn stuff, expand our world and build communities, for example. More people than ever have access to knowledge.

But as with all cultural changes, there are more sinister side effects going on, too. Our transparency—and talent for painting mostly positive pictures of ourselves and emotional states online—lay the groundwork for groupthink, envy, and for the Gargamel types out there, schadenfreude.

Things are getting more democratic and walls are breaking down—but this just means we can see how we really measure up now. Unlike medieval feudal lords, our competition’s only a few steps ahead.

The philosopher David Hume talks about this, in his Treatise of Human Nature:

It is not a great disproportion between ourselves and others which produces envy, but on the contrary, a proximity. A common soldier bears no envy for his general compared to what he will feel for his sergeant or corporal; nor does an eminent writer meet with as much jealousy in common hackney scribblers, as in authors that more nearly approach him.

In other words, democracy and access give us more near-equals to compare ourselves to. As a result, we feel more envious.

Apocalypse Now?

Mass envy followed by active schadenfreude sounds apocalyptic. But I don’t think we’re facing the end of common decency, individuality or a healthy sense of alone-ness in the world.

I think we’re going through a little phase. Like, the world’s first year of college. We’ll have to just stop curling our hair every day and adjust. To deal with the fact that we’re not as special as we’d like to think. There are many people better than us.

And we’ll have to find other ways of being special. Whether it means moving to Westport or having the courage, as my friend Emily recently put it, to just be yourself—even in business, among the peeping toms.

Let’s say you’re funded by the gubmit, and the gubmint’s broke because it spent all its money on oil spills. Or maybe you’re funded by the Man, but the Man’s so busy crushing it, he can’t be bothered to study up on his UI/UE/UX/CS/IA.

That won’t be a problem for you.

Use this Extremely Cheap CS Guide to impress your boss and gain results. Without spending a single K.

The Extremely Cheap CS Guide

• Use Your Brains. There are many wonderful things like content templates, content strategy how-to’s, and content strategy wisdom nuggets in the world. You can read and learn those. Or, before you start writing, you can just sit down and let your brain engine do some thinking for you. “What are my goals? What message am I trying to get across? Who’ll write all this stuff?” she’ll ask.
• Shorten Everything. That means everything: the number of pages on your site. The amount of text on each page. The number of sentences in each paragraph. The number of words in each sentence. Make it little. Make it less. In your municipality, aggressive Completists are thrown in jail.
• Action First. On your website, brochures, tweets and everywhere in between: action is the reason for the season. Be your users’ benevolent steward. Usher them around. Your motto is “Keep them moving; make them happy.”
• Be Direct. You’re done with the wind-up. No more circuitous intros. Does your company build boats out of toothpicks? Then you say so, friend! WE BUILD BOATS OUT OF TOOTHPICKS! Any audio, video or market-speak standing in the way of your proud declaration will be swiftly removed. When it comes to flim flam, your policy is Zero Tolerance.
• Be Human. You might work for the gubmit, but there’s no need to adopt his language! Are you tweeting? Tweet like a (hu) man. Blogging? Blog like you talk. Writing copy for your website? See #1. Hail Orwell.
• Think About The People. You are a gubbner who gubberns for and with The People. That’s why everything you publish on the internet—your website, your social media bytes and your pop-o-matic mailers—is made with the people in mind. Since the people in the southern part of your world think differn’t than the people in the northern part, you always take time to consider and write for their special needs.

And there it is. Content Strategy for Cheap! Cheap! Cheap!

At one point during our discussion, someone asked which of 826’s writing workshops were most popular. Surprisingly, Mr. Eggers said, all the workshops—poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, etc—were almost constantly packed or overfull.  Except for blogging.  None of the kids would show up for the blogging workshop. So he had to cancel it. 

I’m always hearing people talk about how the internet is killing creativity.  Saying that tweeting and blogging are making us all ignunt. That the lights have gone out in America, and we’re entering a new dark ages. That we’re all ADD, digital zombies now.  (Drool. Urp. Gag. [Falls over])

Which is why it was refreshing to hear Mr. Eggers’ anecdote, and think about the many ways in which culture, creativity and literature are not being decimated by our fast-twitch consumption of online ‘content’.

Before I go any further, I should mention that I started out as a luddite. This was partly because of money and the culture I grew up in, but it was also because I’ve never been the kind to get excited about ‘new and shiny’. In fact, I used to be repulsed by new & shiny, which is why I would wear my shoes and purses until they fell apart.  And which is why I threw up in my mouth the first time I used Twitter.

Anyway, the point is this: Even though enjoyment of short-form, online content (much of which consists of porn, poop jokes and cute pix of animals on boobs) is at an all-time high, I don’t think people who enjoy and create artistic, well-considered long-form content are going away.

And that’s because creativity transcends the medium. Aka, creative people who want to write and read thoughtful stuff have been around for a while. They didn’t die when the telephone came. They didn’t die when radio turned to TV.  And they aren’t going to die because of Twitter or Tumblr.

If anything, I predict that our “always-on digital lifestyles” are going to spawn:

• a backlash that leads to more long-form printed literature being desired and created and/or
• new and shiny species of artists and writers and/or
• a compromise in which SOME types of long-form material stay in print, but we consume OTHER types of long-form material online, according to what’s practical, inspiring and sexy

And I think this will happen even if iPad whomps the Kindle whomps the book whomps the publishing industry.

And if time proves me wrong, it won’t matter. Because me and my kind will have locked ourselves underground. Or, nobody will be able to think or read or write at ALL, really, in which case this discussion will be moot, because we won’t be able to understand it.

Guh. Buh. Duh. Bluh.

Creators: Get busy. The lights are still on.

In fact, if you set things up so that minor failures are out of the question, you might actually be setting yourself up for failure in the long run. Why? Because small mistakes don’t just grow from foolishness or a bad work ethic; they’re the by-product of taking healthy and calculated risks. If you’re not making small mistakes, you might not be trying out different strategies and taking on new challenges often enough.

If you’re not making small mistakes, it might mean you’ve whittled your universe down to a few variables you can perfectly control. This can be a fine short-term fix but it’s a horrible long-term strategy, because focusing on just a few predictable variables will stifle learning and growth over time.

If you’re not making small mistakes, you may be avoiding deeper problems and allowing them to simmer underground. After a while, these issues add up to a boiling cauldron. Better to fail small and avoid the cauldron, because making mistakes putting out little fires is far less costly than making mistakes dousing volcanoes.

Of course, the best part about making mistakes is fixing them. It goes like this: Try something new (or even something mundane). Screw up a little bit. Make a note to self. Scratch method X from your repertoire. Try something different. Improve over time.

It does not go: Try something new. Screw up a little bit. Hate yourself and quit. Or: Try something new. Screw up a little bit. Blame your coworker/boss/boyfriend/lunch. Or: Try something new. Screw up a little bit. Ignore failure and repeat.

No. You gotta buy what you break. And give a good-faith effort not to break anything in the first place, because by “make mistakes” I do not mean “disregard the feelings & needs of others while bulling your way through the china shop of your career.” But I digress.

Matt and I fail like we’re being paid to do it. That food-anthropology site we tried to create? Fail. That time we tried to implement no-twitter week? Fail. That time we almost rented a huge office for just the two of us? Fail. That time we tried to enforce a billable hour minimum? Fail. Fail. Fail.

We fail all the time. Not on purpose, but by design—we build space for failure into our process, and expect to make mistakes on a regular basis.

Setting yourself up for success on a large scale means devising systems and experiments that might cause you to fail on a smaller scale. This is called engineering. The scientific method. A scientific approach (which is really just an artistic approach with a different haircut) is required in business, too.

How about this? If you’re not making small mistakes, you make the baby jesus cry.

I think Malcom Gladwell is one of the best journalists we’ve got. Unless I’m missing something, nobody I can think of manages to craft well-researched, illuminating stories as powerful as his these days.

But he’s got his haters. The attacker is typically skeptical of his conclusions, or the methods he used to obtain the data that lead to his conclusions. His methods, it is argued, are not scientific.

While there may be some truth to this criticism (I wouldn’t know, because I haven’t read the primary sources—but how many haters take time to read the primary sources?), criticism focused on the legitimacy of Gladwell’s claims misses a fundamental point:

That Gladwell is interested in telling good stories, not just in publishing verifiable scientific claims. This is not to say he’s negligent of the ‘truth’, though. Rather, I think Gladwell tells the ‘truth’ of his pieces through his characters and the emotional arc of his stories.

In other words, he’s in the business of good writing—in getting to what David Eggers, when talking about his creative non-fiction book What Is The What, has called “the essence of the truth.” And a bit more, in Gladwell’s case.

He says so himself, in his preface to What the Dog Saw:

Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine or anyone else’s and says, angrily, “I don’t buy it.” Why are they angry? Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade…

It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else’s head—even if in the end you conclude that someone else’s head is not a place you’d really like to be.

Get Into Someone Else’s Head

It’s always surprising to me when someone comes knocking for SEO-optimized writing only. I mean, I get it. We need it. SEO is important. But when it comes to writing for a business on the web, more is required.

Web writing is about more than great localized copy and bullet-pointed, easy to scan lists and links. Because your website is a universe, like a story. If the writing is great but the strategy’s off, you fail. If the strategy’s right but the writing is off, you fail. If you don’t help readers understand what you want them to understand about your business, you’ve failed.

We need to get into people’s heads. That pesky discovery question, “What’s your business all about?” requires getting into someone’s head. Figuring out who a client’s audience is requires getting into someone’s head. Writing anything that resonates, even commercially, requires getting into someone’s—namely, your client and his audience’s—heads.

Like good writing in general, good ‘commercial’ writing is not born only from reams of accurate market research. It is born from a empathetic understanding of the people it’s meant to engage, and a good faith effort to engage them. Not to mention web writing chops.

Bonus: if I’ve missed your content-related panel, tell me. I’ll add it!

Friday, March 12th

2:00pm

Content Strategy: What’s In It For You?: Margot Bloomstein

3:30pm

Understanding Content: The Stuff We Design For: Rachel Lovinger & Karen McGrane

Saturday, March 13th

3:30pm

Content Strategy FTW: Kristina Halvorson

Media Armageddon: What Happens When the New York Times Dies: Greg Beato, Markos Moulitsas, Amy Langfield, David Carr, Henry Copeland

5:00pm

New Publishing and Web Content: Erin Kissane, Jeffrey Zeldman, Mandy Brown, Lisa Holton, Paul Ford

Sunday, March 14th

2:00pm

Writing Web Content For a Living: Tiffani Jones, Ian Alexander, Erin Anderson, & Dan Maccarone

Monday, March 15th

12:30pm

Freelance Isn’t Free: The Twisted Economics of Writing Today: Jeff Beckham

Tuesday, March 16th

12:30pm

Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation: Anne Gentle

3:30pm

How to Save Journalism: Drew Curtis, Jeff Weber, Kelly McBride, Matthew Palevsky