Designing Content

It is eleven in the morning. A Tuesday in September. The blinds are still drawn, but I can see the sunlight through them. I think the air is probably cold outside. It gets like that in the Autumn in San Francisco.

So much is happening in my life right now. And, despite it, all I can think about is writing. Every day, the inertia of not doing becomes heavier, and the lightness that comes when I do the work increases. There are many things happening inside of me that I’m discovering, but one thing for certain is that I want to write.

I’ve already tried to write several different blogs about content design today. Each have failed. And the reason seems obvious to me as I sit here writing this one. My heart is not really interested in content design. It’s only a means to an end.

When I first got involved in the field, I came to improve my writing chops. My thoughts were that I could do something that was interesting so that I could get better at the thing I truly cared about—writing poetry, fiction, and essays.

Maybe that’s the thing I’m not supposed to reveal about myself. Maybe what I’m supposed to do is make content design my life’s ambition. Make it the great journey and adventure of my life. I see lots of people doing that anyways. But this field didn’t exist when we were children. We didn’t grow up saying to ourselves “I want to be a content designer.”

Me, I grew up saying “I want to be a writer.” And that hasn’t wavered.

What did you want to be when you were a child? Was it an artist? Was it a writer? Did you want to dance? Or play a sport?

There’s this myth we adopt at some point in our lives that wreaks havoc on ourselves. It’s the one that we are supposed to turn to our petty childhood dreams and turn away from them because they were ‘impossible’ or ‘silly.’ And most of us do. I’ve turned away from my dream for long stretches. They were single-handedly the most disastrous and depressing periods of my life.

Because I wanted to write. And I wouldn’t allow myself to do the thing that, deep down, I wanted to do more than anything else.

So, when I got into this field, I made the conscious choice to do it as a way of becoming a better writer. The question I asked was, “which discipline is going to teach me the most about writing well?” And the answer was plainly obvious.

Content design, at its core, is about simplicity. It’s about parsing all of the nonsense that we layer on top of messaging in the field of marketing. It’s about writing the truest sentence you know, and leading a user into something that can be convoluted and difficult.

When I read my favorite writers, simplicity is always the thing that strikes me. They have this way of writing simple sentences that generate an enormous amount of beauty and purity. And that is what I want.

Clarice Lispector said, “I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.”

And I agree with her. This is a core tenet of art and writing—finding the air of spirit within simplicity that brings your writing from just words on a page to an experience of something more. And you can only achieve that with an effort to learn, mold, and master your craft.

So, the truth about my career is that I am using it as a training. To the end of doing the thing I love doing better. And it has worked exactly as I wanted it to. I’m writing more consistently than I have since college. And my writing is tighter. My chops are improving.

My career is not my life. My life is my life. My career is a means to an end. That’s a distinction I’ve had to make for myself. Because if I didn’t, then I would live my life for a job, or for an opportunity, or for advancement. I wouldn’t choose situations that would enrich my life, help me grow. Instead, I’d make my choices in life based on how it would help improve my career, make me more money, (insert careerism here).

That’s why this blog isn’t really interested in talking about the best content design plugins for Figma. And it never will be.

This blog is interested in the art of writing and design. It’s interested in the more philosophical implications of our work. And how through this work we can come to a greater level of creativity and art within ourselves that will only improve the field.

In my opinion, through this discipline you can learn how to be a better writer, a more thoughtful designer, how to use a strict form to elicit some genuinely creative substance.

And that’s the beauty of the work to me. It’s not about being the greatest content designer in the world. To me, it’s about being a solid writer, and about growing in the craft I hold dear.