I’m a content designer. What am I?

As a fairly new discipline, content design suffers from a degree of elusiveness that can make content buy-in considerably harder than it should be. To change that, here’s one content designer’s meager attempt at explaining what we do all day — and why our colleagues and clients should care if we didn’t.

You design what now?

Before we get started, I have a confession to make: A couple years ago, when I first got promoted from a copywriter intern to a junior content designer, I didn’t fully understand what my fancy new title meant.

To me, content designer sounded like one of those BS titles like “Compliance Evangelist”, “Customer Dialogue Manager” or “Chief Happiness Officer”. But the more I got exposed to the work of other content designers and copywriters, the more I started to understand the distinction. And the more time went on, the more it dawned on me what a limited understanding many of the people around me, including colleagues, clients and my mother, have on what I do for a living.

For the last time, I am not a copywriter

By far the easiest way to explain what we do is to compare it to something that is relatively close from a layman’s perspective but sufficiently far from ours. And in this particular instance, that something is copywriting.

So even though I’m not claiming that copywriters’ and content designers’ jobs are worlds apart, I can easily spot three fundamental areas in which our approaches differ.

You are what you produce — copy vs. content

Here’s the thing: the main objective of copy is to sell stuff. And even though I refuse to see 21st century copywriters as the whiskey-drinking and cigar-smoking alpha males portrayed in Mad Men, that much has stayed the same. Content, on the other hand, comes with a range of objectives, the most common of which are to educate or entertain.

Furthermore, there’s a good reason for why there weren’t any content designers running around Madison Avenue in the 60’s. You see, when copywriting first became a thing, the formats that were available weren’t technologically complex or even that many in number. Basically, there were TV ads and then there were print ads. And while most copywriters have had to adopt a number of formats since (think digital display ads, social media and email direct marketing), functional digital services such as websites and mobile applications require much more than catchy headlines to truly work for their users. And that’s where content design comes in handy.

What do you do all day? — writer vs. designer

Now don’t get me wrong: I love writing. To me, it’s a natural form of expression. However, I don’t identify as a writer, because I spend about third of my time writing, and the remainder abstracting, concepting and planning things. In other words, I design more than I write.

But here’s where our colleagues and industry peers often get it wrong: concept, UX and digital service designers are so accustomed to working with great writers, they sometimes imagine that awkward customer flows can be fixed with some clever microcopy. However, you can trust me when I tell you that involving a word nerd in the design process early on makes avoiding, recognizing and fixing usability problems much more efficient.

Who do you work for? — business vs. people

I like to think of it this way: while copywriters’ primary mission is to advocate for their client or the product they’re selling, content designers are vouching for the user. Thus, while copy is ultimately written to drive business goals, content represents information that is designed specifically to fulfill user needs.

Much like any other type of experience, content must be designed, tested and validated with real users. While customer approval is nice, the people whose stamp of approval content designers are ultimately looking for aren’t (usually) on the payroll.

So… What is a content designer?

The way I see it, digital content designers are hybrids between service designers, UX designers and copywriters. We are in charge of designing, but not necessarily producing the content of a digital product or service. Our main objective is to structure, categorize and name content elements so that the users can find and consume them easily. Our daily tasks may include conducting user research, interviewing people, auditing existing material, validating concepts, writing and editing. But to be able to do all those things to the best of our ability, we need our colleagues and clients to understand why content matters.