LessFuss Design

There was one clear theme that ran through many of the talks at last week’s New Adventures in Web Design conference in Nottingham – that the future of web design lies in ‘Content out’: the idea that everything starts with the content, and it dictates how you approach every aspect of the design, rather than creating a design into which the content gets poured later. Amen, I say. But there’s just one problem. Most of us only get the damned stuff at the last minute.

The curse of lorem ipsum

‘Content out’ really shouldn’t be such a novel concept, even for such a new industry as web design. And yet web designers often start work on a new project with little more than a rough idea of the content they are supposed to be designing for. Clients can be very vocal and very protective when it comes to branding and use of typefaces, logos and colours (every client has an opinion on colours), but they are often less forthcoming when you start to talk about the content they want to put on the site. Designers & developers, how many times have you got a design agreed and a site built before you’ve received all the final copy? I know I have.

In my experience (and I’ll admit here that all my freelance clients are small business owners, and it may be a completely different story with big name brands and corporate outfits), clients themselves may not know at the start of a project what actual content they want to put onto their website. They may have an idea, based on what they’ve seen from other businesses in their sector, or other websites they’ve seen that they have liked.

In other words, they have an idea of what they’re after aesthetically. The brief the designer gets is often more than adequate for him/her to come up with something that will satisfy the client’s aesthetic taste. But that aesthetic, how the thing looks, cannot be properly evaluated – either by the client or the designer – until it’s seen in context with the final copy and other content.

And yet we give clients designs that substitute content with latin placeholder text, and ask them to approve our work without the most essential element they need to make an informed decision. Essentially we are asking them to decide whether our work meets their aesthetic requirements – which is only half the story. Neither client nor designer can judge whether the design will succeed as an intrinsic part of a user’s journey through the narrative of the site.

The same applies to the other side of the coin, content generation. The ideal scenario for copywriters would be to work closely with the designers at an early stage and to give valuable input into the design process and art direction, since the pace and tone of their copy should have a profound effect on the design. In reality writers are often equally as hamstrung as designers. If clients brief design and copy to separate agencies, the output of both streams of work may only meet at the point it gets handed to the developers for building. Copywriters may get sight of a design draft and get the opportunity to offer feedback, but it’s hardly the same as having a say from the start of the creative process – and there’s no guarantee any of their recommendations will be adopted.

The New Adventure

All of this seems completely bonkers when you consider the ideas coming out of last week’s New Adventures in Web Design conference. Like many designers in the audience I’m sure, I found myself getting excited listening to Mark Boulton‘s ‘New Canon’ talk on designing from the content out, and to Andy Clarke‘s brilliant presentation on taking cues from both movies and comic book design to build narratives on the web that deftly control pace and flow of content to guide users through a journey (‘Once Upon a Time on the Web’). Even Gregg Wood‘s experiment on presenting the same content with and without clear art direction and design, while far from radical, made it blindingly obvious that for a design to be fully effective it must be driven by the content.

While listening to these presentations I found myself thinking about the recent projects I’ve worked on. Realistically, with how many recent projects could I have tried Andy Clarke’s approach? On how many projects could I have taken real content, with a clear understanding of the path my clients wanted their users to be guided through, and created a design that complemented the content at every step of that journey? The answer is very few. In reality, most of the web projects I’ve worked on have essentially been about creating a set of templates to pour content into at a later point. In other words, a separation of content and design, with design, not content, coming first.

Putting Content Out into practice

I think as an industry web design is a long way from realising this New Adventure. This was brought home during the question and answer session at the end of the conference. Gregg Wood, who had made the case that users are far more engaged when consuming content that has been carefully art directed and designed, was asked by a member of the audience whether there was any way of employing his technique without having any of the content available. “No” was the emphatic answer.

As I see it, there would need to be a seachange in how designers, clients and copywriters all approach web projects if we were to take Content Out by the scruff of the neck. There would be some substantial challenges:

• Copywriters and content providers would need to work with designers from the very beginning. Where clients and agencies have tight timescales and budgets, is it realistic to expect everyone to work closely from the start?
• If clients are providing the content themselves (and in the case of small businesses on a tight budget, this is likely), would they be prepared – or even able – to come up with finished copy before the designer gets to work? Clients need to be aware of the crucial relationship between design and copy, and not see the copy as something that can be injected at the end – well written copy can be diluted in a poor design, likewise visitors will see right through poor content in a kick-ass design.
• Should Content Out sites be content-managed? If we start to create web experiences that follow Andy Clarke’s approach, with every word and every action part of a tightly controlled narrative, are we in danger of disrupting that narrative if we hand sites over to clients and expect them to manage it themselves? Is that asking way too much of them?

I’m right behind this idea of Content Out. I think it’s how the web should be written and designed for going forwards, and I’m pretty sure copywriters and other designers would agree. Whether it’s realsitic or not is another matter.

A quick note on the New Adventures conference

After 13 odd years in web design, this was the first time I’d seen the Galácticos of the web design world in action. I had high expectations, and for the most part I wasn’t disappointed. Dan Rubin and Andy Clarke – Figo and Zidane respectively – were compelling and fascinating to listen to, as was the excellent Jon Tan (he’s Raúl for me) – his talk on the Lizard Brain is the one I keep thinking back to. Tim Van Damme, on the other hand, proved he’s the Ronaldo of the group – a genius on the field maybe, but it’s not always the best idea to give him a microphone…

On the whole it was a fantastic day, so thanks should go to Simon Collison and his team for putting it all together. Look out for New Adventures in 2012, you wouldn’t want to miss it.