Iain Broome

Ray Newman on the pursuit of content perfection often sought by stakeholder types, especially in government:

The antithesis of content design is the old skool Civil Service idea that, if you just try hard enough, you can find “a form of words” that will make everybody happy, nobody sad, and nobody angry.

Or, at least, obfuscate the unpopular policy sufficiently that nobody will realise they should be mad about it.

And then towards the end of the post:

But sometimes, you need to hold the detail back; or disappoint some people to make it clearer for most people; or clearly and directly tell people something they won't want to hear.

It’s rarely easy to balance these, and the many other concerns in the mix. But that’s why the content needs to be designed – not just knocked out, banged together, or scribbled on the back of a napkin.

I think there is also something here about research, constraints and making informed decisions.

You need research to understand who your content is for and how it might affect them, either positively or negatively. But you also have the internal pressure of deadlines and budgets – these are frustrating, but very real content constraints. They too affect your decision making.

As Ray says, this is why many of us call ourselves designers these days and not copywriters. Our choices are based on the situation in front of us. We take all that we know about our users and design the best content we can at any given time.

In my experience, good content design is rarely about finding the ideal 'form of words'. It's about listening, compromise and pragmatism. Writing good content is a messy, movable feast, not a meal to be cooked to perfection.

Love this clear explanation from Martin Underhill of what headers, headings and titles are, and why they are very much not the same.

This resonates:

Three particular terms I often hear being used interchangeably are ‘header’, ‘heading’, and ‘title’; I even catch myself doing it sometimes! Let’s have a look how they can be confused.

And this seems pretty sensible:

What a designer calls something should not differ from what a developer calls it, and the easiest way to ensure this consistency is to use the terminology defined by the super smart people who wrote HTML and ARIA.

If you work in content that lives on the internet, I think you should know the differences and be able to explain them.

Basically:

• header – usually a banner area where a logo, strapline and navigation lives
• title – search-friendly metadata that describes the page and appears in the browser, not the page itself
• headings – the h1, h2, h3 content that helps structure a page and provides an outline of your content

If you're reading this and thinking, "Hmm, still not sure," then I highly recommend you go check out Underhill's post. It includes much more detailed definitions and useful examples to help you out.