The Evolution of Content Design: One Human’s Journey

In the beginning, there was the copywriter. She was given an assignment, then sent away. Alone she wrote. On a designated day, she returned with the completed assignment. Upon receipt, the powers that be thanked her in a single line, and that was that. Maybe some time would pass and the copywriter might see the words she’d written out in the wild internet. But maybe not. Another assignment would arrive, and the copywriter would go about her solo task.

When I first entered tech in 2012, writing anything for a product team was often an interface-less pursuit. My memory of that time period was of solitary work, divorced from design. Talking with other writers who spun their craft in those days, many remember the same. Some of us worked in a blank doc that a designer would silently harvest for copy as they needed it, while others were bestowed a barely decipherable spreadsheet and made a parlor game of guessing where their words might show up in the UI. There were a lucky few who got to work directly with designers at the very moment of creation, but for many of us, that level of collaboration arrived later. 

Evolving tech, evolving collaboration

For me, the major shift came in 2014 with the advent of Google’s Material Design. The new design framework was imbued with a sense of deep interactivity between human and device. The design language provided more elements that could give form to what was on the screen — it was like a visual injection of information architecture and the ability to create hierarchy. You might remember suddenly feeling like your screen was more alive. 

Because Material Design emphasized interaction, the look, feel, and read of an experience needed to evolve to match that sensibility. Static, flat color blocks gave way to clean backgrounds that helped showcase both words and visuals, which often incorporated an active UI story with animation that moved along with the scroll or swipe. 

With more focus on the words and their relationship to the UI elements and visual flow, old product copy needed a revamp. The writing quickly got more conversational, more succinct, and more aligned to the user’s perspective. I’m convinced this is when very verb-driven headlines and body copy became the standard we now see across the web, along with more chatty CTAs like, “OK,” “Let’s go,” and “Got it!” 

Unlike in the previous solitary years, I started working hand-in-hand with product designers. With my closest design partners, it was like we were riding a tandem bike. It was fun! Together we created the narrative — both visual and written — that cascaded down a page or in a series of swipes from screen to screen. Together we worked to refine concepts and flow, hierarchy and architecture, visuals and words. It was a very personal, and thankfully positive, lesson in how a shift in technology could transform the very structure of how we work. My workflow went from solitary and siloed from design to being highly collaborative. And it was in the collaboration that I started to get a handle on how words and visuals had to not only work together but in fact had to be created together in order to produce a meaningful experience for the human on the other end of the product. 

Collaboration between writers and product designers has become more dynamic as the tools continue to evolve. This is especially true for people like me who’ve been working from home for years, even before the pandemic. To be sure, I’ve had the excellent experience of on-site gigs where I get to hole up in a room with a product team for agile design sprints, everyone sketching ideas on reams of paper, penning user flows on whiteboards, creating a delightful maelstrom of sticky notes every which way. These in-person sprints were some of my favorite high-chemistry collab moments. But even in such great alchemy of the “before times,” the physical evidence of the design sprint still always needed to be transcribed into digital form. 

During this remote era, it’s been incredible to see how deeper collaboration can be driven by digital tools. For example, Figma has been a major game changer, especially for writers. All those copy docs of yore, no longer! Never again do I have to anxiously message my design team to grab the new versions of copy before we head into a presentation (gahhhhhh!). Now content-person and visual-person can truly mindmeld in a Figma layer, applying the words right into the design so we can get the look, feel, messaging, and, yes, the all important character count, right with so much more speed and facility (and fun). I’m also a huge fan of whiteboard tools like Miro and FigJam as online playgrounds where my design partners and I can riff on ideas. 

A name, a name, what’s in a name? 

Back when I was freelance, what I did for creative teams was usually called “copywriting.” From about 2014 to 2018, every new gig rolled in with a contract assigned to a Senior Copywriter. On my portfolio, website, and, yes, LinkedIn profile, I started using a mix of terms — Content Strategist, UX Writer, Product Writer, and the old jazz standard Senior Copywriter. 

For me, it was from the collaborative spirit described above that the ideas of Content + Design began to draw super close to one another. I’ve noticed a few people suggest they were “the one” who coined the term Content Design, either in an article, blog post, or field talk. But I think these concepts were out there coalescing among all the writers noodling away in product teams. Content Design as a term, a title, a discipline was waiting to be “discovered” by many practitioners of the craft all at once. 

As I marinated on the various titles in play, “Copywriter” seemed woefully malnourished, a term hanging on from the past. “Content Strategist” felt close but didn’t reflect the craftsmanship at the heart of product creation. “UX Writer” and “Product Writer” got closer but still weren’t quite right, perhaps too narrow. All these terms had something in common — there was no mention of Design. For me, that became the key to adopting and advocating for “Content Design.” None of these other titles capture what the job truly entails, which is the combination and collaboration of language and design-thinking. 

We’re growing up

Sometimes I hear my writer kin describe what they do as “designing with words.” As Content Design becomes “more of a thing,” I think we’ll go through different phases of defining what the discipline entails. Right now is a special moment, at the very beginning of something, when there’s a lot of freedom in variety. Every Content Designer is different, shaped by their own personal preferences in workflow and how their minds go about creating and collaborating. Personally, I revel in early-stage work, when I’m in idea-chemistry mode my design, research, UX, strategy, and product partners. It’s what I like to call the concept layer — when we’re all jamming to figure out what ideas and actions a person will encounter and need to take as they move through an experience. The exact word choices, at least for me, often come later on, as part of the simultaneous momentum with the exact visuals. By then, if I’ve done my job right, the conceptual framework will set the narrative that’s needed in motion. So, “designing with words,” feels like a reduction. We do so much more! We should be where the ideas are in formation. 

Recently, I was talking with our team intern and was both delighted and totally taken aback by her extremely cogent ideas and definitions of the Content Design. It hit home that “the youth” are really the first generation who will join the writer-workforce as Content Design is a fully named (if not fully grown) discipline. 

Something I like about having kicked around the industry before the term came into wide adoption is the feeling of having grown into the work as it organically evolved from the primordial soup. That has left room for a much more winding path, intuitive workflow, and experimentation. I hope that the discipline, as it grows up, continues to be as expansive as it feels right now.