Design starts with understanding the content
Before I start designing, I want to know what I’m actually working with:
- What is the project trying to communicate?
- Who is going to use it?
- Where will it live/be shared? Online? Print?
- What information is most important?
- Is there a lot of data? Figures? Tables?
These questions have a direct impact on the design.
A 100-page research report isn’t going to be designed the same way as a 20-page annual report, even if they belong to the same organization.
A website with hundreds of research reports has very different requirements from a small brochure-style website.
A presentation template intended for researchers to use themselves needs to accommodate very different content than a presentation created for a single event.
The content gives us the information we need to make those decisions.
You can’t design information effectively without understanding it
This is particularly important when working on research and data-heavy projects. The information itself is often complex, and the challenge isn’t simply to make it look attractive. It’s to help the reader understand it, quickly and easily.
That means creating a clear hierarchy so someone can quickly find the information they’re looking for, by scanning and seeing bolded, larger headings. It might mean turning an important statistic into a visual callout, restructuring a page so a complicated idea is easier to follow, or developing an infographic that makes complex findings easier to understand.
These decisions can’t be made in isolation from the content.
I’ve worked on reports where the original document structure didn’t necessarily reflect the way the information needed to be communicated. Sometimes the most useful part of the design process is figuring out that a piece of content needs to be reorganized before we even start worrying about fonts and colours.
Websites Depend on Content-Led Design
Websites are perhaps the clearest example of why content needs to be part of the design process from the beginning.
A website isn’t just a series of pages with a visual treatment applied to them. Its structure needs to reflect the key information people are interested in and looking for and the way they are likely to navigate through it.
If we start designing a website before understanding the content, we’re essentially guessing at the structure. Once the real content arrives, we may discover that the navigation doesn’t make sense, that some pages need to be combined, that important, quality content has been buried or that users need a completely different way to move through the site.
That’s why content planning and website design are so closely connected. The content helps determine the architecture, and the architecture determines how the design needs to work.
Strategy Shapes the Design
To start a website project, we kick it off with a strategy stage where we:
- Learn the key priorities of organizations
- See what work is being produced and the frequency
- Analyze Google Analytics data
With these considerations in mind, we help to shape the direction of what content to feature prominently.
Content-led doesn’t mean boring
I think there’s sometimes a misconception that content-led design means putting function ahead of creativity and ending up with something plain.
In reality, I find that having good content to work with gives me far more opportunities to be creative. It might seem counterintuitive, but having a set of rules or guidelines before starting a design project can actually make the design process easier. Rather than limiting the possibilities, they narrow the scope of what we’re trying to accomplish and give the creative process a clear direction.
- A strong statistic can become a visual focal point.
- A recurring type of information can inspire a visual system or page structure.
- A complicated research finding can become the starting point for an infographic.
- A large collection of reports can be organized in a way that makes the whole library feel more coherent and approachable.
The content provides the raw material. The design figures out how to make the most of it.
Trying to look like everyone else
This is the big one.
When every brand in your space follows the same visual trends, the safest choice becomes the least effective one.
Blending in might feel strategic—but it usually just makes you invisible.
Good design helps people understand
Ultimately, that’s what we’re trying to accomplish with content-led design. We are not designing around the idea of what I think something should look like. I’m designing around what the content needs to do.
Sometimes that results in a highly visual solution. Sometimes it means a very simple layout with excellent typography and hierarchy. Sometimes the right answer is to completely rethink how information is organized.
There isn’t one visual style that works for every project because there isn’t one type of content or audience. Good design responds to those differences.
The goal isn’t to make the content fit the design or force it into a predetermined format. It’s to create a design that makes the content clearer, more useful and more engaging for the people it’s intended for. Let’s get creative AND always bring a strategic, informed consideration to everything that we create.
Have a project in mind? Get in touch and let’s create something that works.
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