Content Insights Blog

This post originally appeared on my personal blog, which I'm retiring. It was one of my post popular posts.

When I talk to people — clients, UX professionals, interactive marketers — about content, I find an assumption often lurks beneath their comments. What's that assumption? It's content = copy. From that assumption follows many other unspoken assumptions that give me the willies:  Read More >

Craving comments for your blog or website? Try text. As Tom Johnson explains, textual content is what really matters to your users. So, he asks, "Shouldn’t a content expert play a role in shaping and planning that content?"

"Content includes more than text. ... But the kingpin of it all is text. Words. And this is the writer’s domain. Rather than trying to move beyond text, maybe we should embrace our strength."  Read More >

What's one key to successful marketing? Telling the story. And what's essential to storytelling? Good writing. 

"... good design gets out of the way of the message. ... Writing is clearly the first and most important part of telling your story. ... Without devoting considerable time toward writing, and investing in the structured work writing requires such that it becomes an established discipline at your firm, the value of your story will be lost."   Read More >

Content strategists can take inspiration from a designer's perspective on analysis. In a recent Layers Magazine article, freelance designer and illustrator Jonas Bergstrand shared his tips on maintaining a creative edge. The key, he says, is analysis.

"Ideas don’t appear out of nowhere; that only happens in cartoons. In reality, they appear after methodical provocation—analysis. Having a clear strategy on how to attack a creative problem is the best way to maintain inspiration because that rules out the fear of not coming up with an idea. ... The first thing to do when handed a brief or problem is to strip the info all the way to the bone, cut it to the core, rewrite it in just a word or two, and then illustrate what’s left."  Read More >