How can disciplines work together to achieve a structured design based on evolving, creative storytelling?

1. Structuring content
in an evolving design.
@emcguane

2. About me.
@emcguane

3. I used to work like this.

4. Now I work like this.

5. A project.

6. Pitch first, reverse
engineer later.

7. Writing for everyone,
from scratch.

8. •Platform
•Backbone
•Gaps

9. What are you
willing to sacrifice?

10. •Agile, kind of
•Mobile-first, sort of
•Responsive, mostly

11. The story.

12. All the products.

13. Structure to
support content
delivery?

14. Structure to
support editors.

15. Narrative structure.

16. I’m$a$sheep$farmer$and$use$my$Honda$generator$to$power$sheep$scanners,$
as$soon$as$the$sheep$become$pregnant.$It$is$used$at$an$early$stage$in$
pregnancy$to$tell$whether$a$ewe$is$in$lamb$or$not.$
The story of every
product.

17. The story of
the brand.

18. The arc
of a page.
The hook
A single telling
detail
Choice
Comparison at the
heart
Benefits in a
narrative
Emotion as an
anchor
Choice
Choice

19. Story told in sequence.

20. The whole story.
The
teaser
The proof
The
technical
stuff
The fun
extras
The
decision

21. The reader rules all.

22. Mobile first
inevitably.

23. Where we went
wrong.

24. “Let’s focus on structure to begin
with, and think about content all the
time.”
- @markboulton

25. We wrote words early.
And looked to words
already written.

26. Content modeling?

27. What formats should we
build?

28. Just how much
content variety
does one site need?

29. How do you
communicate these
decisions?

30. Tools and
documentation.

31. Own your IA.

32. Source material is
only one input.

33. Structure can’t be
siloed from meaning.

34. @markboulton again: “Designing a
magazine or newspaper system
requires the designer to exercise
rigorous restraint with a hugely
variable melting pot of content.”

35. Structure without
goals or needs is
useless.

37. A Page Description Diagram?
(I hate naming things)

38. ‘A trigger, not a
finished brief.’
- Greig Robinson

39. Structure and the
CMS.

40. Always be OK with
letting things go.

41. Work better
together.

42. “The best solution isn’t to build tools
that hide that complexity from the
user, that make them think that the
styling they’re adding to the desktop
site is the “real” version of the
content.
- @karenmcgrane

43. Need to think
visually and
structurally.

44. My success story.

45. Price.
Rate.
Service.

46. Why it worked:
precise. reusable.
needs-based.

47. Structure is a
common thread
between disciplines.

48. Content modeling is “the practice
by which disciplines collaborate on
the design of structured content”.
- Cleve Gibbon & Rachel Lovinger

49. All design should be “the practice
by which disciplines collaborate on
the design of structured content”.
- Everyone someday, hopefully

50. Thank you.
@emcguane