Weeknotes 5 April 2024, 12 April 2024 Apr 12 2024April 19, 2024 It’s another double bill for this week’s weeknotes! – Easter break was lovely, and I caught up in-person with an ex-graphic design colleague from waay back. He now runs the Electric Eel cocktail bar in Karlsruhe. We talked career paths and speakeasys, Basset hounds and folk documentaries. And writing. It turns out Craig was an ace at advertorial writing, but morphed into graphical design. He writes a mean weekly newsletter from the Eel, check it out. – Wrote/designed various informational advice articles for arts copyright client. Learnt more about moral rights! Excellent factual source material for the evidenced user-needs, so mainly reshaping question and answer content into topics with front-loaded headers. I shared some clear language do-overs of incidental legalese on the Cake Content Consultancy LI page. – It’s going to take a little longer to get the original localgov service patterns up due to various factors, mainly how incredibly good the interactive demo site was. It’ll likely be just the screenshots and descriptions. – Upheld that you are not the user, but promptly after found that sometimes you are – in a chat with James Green about content translator options. I was flummoxed to find how disparate my need as a user (an obvious translate button please, ideally with an icon that makes sense in any language) differentiated from what I would recommend as good practice (trio writing or as a fall back a browser extension). Don’t worry, I’ve now got the Google translator extension for Chrome. But if it took me a digital professional this long… #DigitalSkillsGap – Adam Silver (loving his LinkedIn profile url), who has in the last couple of months been the closest thing I’ve ever had to a mentor, gave me some great advice again. As a result I am taking down my user-centred content design educational offering and reshaping it. Watch this space. – Adam launched his Prototype Kit course for government designers including content designers, which by all accounts is excellent. If you’ve seen the quality of his posts or read his newsletter, you’ll already know that it would be. I’m tempted to take it myself, and have been thinking again about the logic and little grey cell challenges of working in code… – Disappointed to hear that there was a meet-up with ‘proving value of content design’ top of agenda, loosely associated with folk who 12 years prior named and defined content design, and 5 years after they published a deeply researched article proving the value of content design, including quoted research from Gerry McGovern on how content edits can literally save lives. I co-wrote that article, I’ll add a link to my copy of on this blog, as for some reason it’s not live in its original location any more. – All this does beg the question, perhaps there’s something wrong with the naming and defining part? Does it properly say what it does on the tin? No, it seems to me. Is ‘content design’, in fact, a jargon term? Is this making things harder for all the content folk out there, advocating, sketching and typing at the digital coalface, and in fact getting laid off it? It might be. This is why the discipline name is more than semantics. As previously mentioned, I’m #TeamInformationDesign – and yes we need t-shirts. I must re-check on tickets for the Information Design conference Caroline Jarrett mentioned to me. – For people currently looking for a new role, please feel free to browse my Content design interview questions article, which includes an outline simple CV template. Portfolios seem to be a requirement too these days. – T-shirts were again a theme in terms of their capability as a wearable display for quotes from developers on what they thought about content design, before they’d worked with content designers. This brilliant piece of “real talk” interdisciplinary research was curated and facilitated by Mary Sabotkoski. – Relatedly, Torrey Podmajersky is talking about content design for developers in July, and Mary shared the excellent talk she gave on content design meets engineering in 2022. I love the content designer-developer relationship when it happens. Perhaps we do just need to proliferate content design more, rather than iterating it with new label text. I gave a shout out to excellent developers I’ve collaborated with in the past. (Side note: with designers sometimes barring us from the prototype, perhaps going direct to dev is The Way). – Loved Megan Legawiec’s work on empty states, and Co-op’s work on communicating research findings – thanks Jane McFayden for bringing it to my attention. – Thrilled to discover there is a band called CAKE, and they are the folk who put out ‘Going the Distance’. Shared for some Tuesday energy, after watching the Paris marathon at the weekend – inspiration from those hand tap cardboard signs that the runners did actually enjoy interacting with, despite the 26.4 mile course. – And in wrapping up, a little bird suggested I put out a regular newsletter. Perhaps this will evolve into that… Don’t forget to check out the Cake Design Objet D’Week series too, where we probe an actual 3D object (I know!!!) to see how user-centred it is.
