Critical Analysis 7
The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention.
John Burroughs
User Interface Design – Fall 2019
Critical Analysis 7
What does writing have to do with design?
- If you don’t think you need to write good then you’s an idiot
- The future of content strategy
- Content Marketing: Is your design killing your content?
Writing has everything to do with design. Our basic human functions all depend upon the communication of ideas, needs, wants and desires. Design is the communication of ideas. Language is the core of our intelligent ability to communicate, and a command of language is key in creating design, let alone garnering respect from your peers. Mark Busse states in If you don’t think you need to write good then you’s an idiot:
“Communication design is firmly rooted in language… Ideas are at the core of great communication design, and ideas are expressed by words as much as visuals.”
I really enjoyed learning about Karen McGrane in The future of content strategy. I appreciate how passionately she feels about her job as both an Information Architect, and a Content Strategist. And that you cannot have one without the other. She so clearly understood what her strengths were in this exploding new frontier of the internet. (I also appreciate that she mentioned that she used, as a kid, Prodigy as one of her early methods of exploring the internet, because that is what I remember using back in the day.)
I realized that this article was written in 2013, which now being 2019, comes across a little dated. But then I really enjoyed her accurate prediction of the future:
“I’m very interested in when speech-based interfaces are a reality. Everybody pokes fun at Siri. But, you know, people [laughed] at touchscreens for the last 20 years and then, one day, touchscreens turned up and they worked perfectly – and transformed how we interact with technology in ways we never anticipated. The same thing is going to happen with speech…Our content really does have to go everywhere. If you start trying to solve that problem now, you’ll be better off in the future.”
Speech-based interfaces are absolutely saturating the world now. I have 3 Amazon Echoes in my house right now, and I often call upon Siri for help throughout the day.
The importance of good content is emphasized in Jim Connolly’s blog Content Marketing: Is your design killing your content?:
“The design should work like a picture frame and enhance, not hide, your work.”
Jim talks about the fact that design won’t matter, if your content isn’t interesting to people, or if it is poorly written, or if it is out of date… etc. Your content, essentially your writing, must be of the highest caliber quality in order for your site to stand out and engage it’s visitors. This again is dependent upon the writing portion of Web Design.
designs-by-day.com 