Christopher Butler

January 24th 2012

My latest article for Newfangled is out…

The Truth About Content

I spend a lot of time creating content, talking about content, and creating content about creating content. So much so that the word content is hard for me to even say without feeling a little weird about it. Say any word enough and it begins to lose meaning. Sometimes I feel as if I’m trapped within a slightly-bigger-than-me-sized content bubble, that I’ve lost any objectivity when it comes to what it means to create content and understand how it operates in the world. That may or may not be true. But despite the disorientation that is sometimes at the heart of the content experience, I can see that content has taught me a thing or two…

You can read the rest here →

Posted at 10:00am and tagged with: content-strategy, content, writing,.

My latest article for Newfangled is out…
The Truth About Content I spend a lot of time creating content, talking about content, and creating content about creating content. So much so that the word content is hard for me to even say without feeling a little weird about it. Say any word enough and it begins to lose meaning. Sometimes I feel as if I’m trapped within a slightly-bigger-than-me-sized content bubble, that I’ve lost any objectivity when it comes to what it means to create content and understand how it operates in the world. That may or may not be true. But despite the disorientation that is sometimes at the heart of the content experience, I can see that content has taught me a thing or two…
You can read the rest here →

October 17th 2011

9 notes |#

My latest article for Smashing Magazine is out now…

How Disregarding Design Limits The Power Of Content

It appears to be a reader’s market. More written content is freely available than ever before, accessible in just about every format you could imagine. If you want it on paper, you’ve got it. On screen? What size, friend? We can shrink, stretch and stitch it all together every which way because, really, we’re just talking about words here… Or are we?

As soon as I ask that question, several others quickly follow:

-Is content so flexible?
-Is content’s most basic unit the word? Or is it, perhaps, the message?
-In today’s reader’s market, what of the writers and the designers who make reading possible?
-And are we building tools that honor their work, too?

These questions didn’t randomly pop into my head one day. Nor did a design problem get me thinking along these lines. It was while reading — for pleasure — that I noticed something was wrong. After experimenting with a few different services that let me save articles to read later in a much more reader-friendly format (what I’ve come to call “reading advocacy” tools) it occurred to me that in the process of extracting content from its original context and accessing it elsewhere, I might be losing some information along the way.

I decided to see for myself by examining several pieces of content and comparing how they look and function in a variety of incarnations: the printed page, the Web and eReaders. What I found was both encouraging and, for a designer who loves to read and write, slightly troubling. I’ll warn you in advance: there are many examples below, but I think they’re all necessary in order to convey an accurate picture of just what happens to content when we start moving it around. To properly set it up, let’s first briefly look back in history…

You can read the rest here >

Posted at 10:13am and tagged with: design, content,.

My latest article for Smashing Magazine is out now…
How Disregarding Design Limits The Power Of Content It appears to be a reader’s market. More written content is freely available than ever before, accessible in just about every format you could imagine. If you want it on paper, you’ve got it. On screen? What size, friend? We can shrink, stretch and stitch it all together every which way because, really, we’re just talking about words here… Or are we? As soon as I ask that question, several others quickly follow: -Is content so flexible? -Is content’s most basic unit the word? Or is it, perhaps, the message? -In today’s reader’s market, what of the writers and the designers who make reading possible? -And are we building tools that honor their work, too? These questions didn’t randomly pop into my head one day. Nor did a design problem get me thinking along these lines. It was while reading — for pleasure — that I noticed something was wrong. After experimenting with a few different services that let me save articles to read later in a much more reader-friendly format (what I’ve come to call “reading advocacy” tools) it occurred to me that in the process of extracting content from its original context and accessing it elsewhere, I might be losing some information along the way. I decided to see for myself by examining several pieces of content and comparing how they look and function in a variety of incarnations: the printed page, the Web and eReaders. What I found was both encouraging and, for a designer who loves to read and write, slightly troubling. I’ll warn you in advance: there are many examples below, but I think they’re all necessary in order to convey an accurate picture of just what happens to content when we start moving it around. To properly set it up, let’s first briefly look back in history…
You can read the rest here >

March 9th 2011

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Visual Thinking for Content Creators

The third engagement style—and maybe the most fun of them all—is visual thinking. I’ve already covered talking and listening in my last two posts, and with this one, I think you’ll have three strong new ways to develop new ideas for web content.

Realizing that I was a primarily visual thinker was a significant turning point in my career. Believe it or not, I only realized it last year. Yes, I went to art school and, yes, I have done visually creative things most of my life, but I always assumed that everyone saw images the way I did. But after talking to enough of my friends, colleagues and clients, I realized that wasn’t true. Some people aren’t visual thinkers. Some people think verbally, and some of those people may have a much easier time with writing than I do. But once I realized that, I had a bit of an epiphany: No wonder so many design professionals struggle with writing—they force themselves to start with words rather than the images their mind has already created!

Read the rest >

Posted at 2:00pm and tagged with: content, web-content-strategy, writing,.

Visual Thinking for Content Creators
The third engagement style—and maybe the most fun of them all—is visual thinking. I’ve already covered talking and listening in my last two posts, and with this one, I think you’ll have three strong new ways to develop new ideas for web content. Realizing that I was a primarily visual thinker was a significant turning point in my career. Believe it or not, I only realized it last year. Yes, I went to art school and, yes, I have done visually creative things most of my life, but I always assumed that everyone saw images the way I did. But after talking to enough of my friends, colleagues and clients, I realized that wasn’t true. Some people aren’t visual thinkers. Some people think verbally, and some of those people may have a much easier time with writing than I do. But once I realized that, I had a bit of an epiphany: No wonder so many design professionals struggle with writing—they force themselves to start with words rather than the images their mind has already created!
Read the rest >

November 1st 2010

2 notes |#

Content 101

I went to school with a lot of furniture designers. They made beautiful things. But they’d get pretty caught up in techniques—dovetail joints, lamination, etc.—and end up making pieces that simply afforded them the opportunity to use those techniques. You’d sometimes look at the results and wonder who would actually use them now that they were built. Furniture is meant to support and hold things; bookshelves for books, desks for paperwork and tools, tables for meals, beds, chairs and couches for people. A good piece of furniture is designed for its function, and as such may use some of those fancy techniques designers crave to try. Web design has the same relationship between technique and purpose, and like furniture, websites have one basic function: to support and hold content.

But content is still a pretty mysterious thing to many people. Everyone gets that it’s important; talking about content in terms of how important it is tends to elicit all kinds of specific questions, like, “What kinds of content?” “How much content?” “Can I use content from other websites?” and many more. And frankly, we have tons of content about content on our website that, in the aggregate, will answer all these questions. But in this article, I want to go back to the basics and look at the various kinds of content you might create for your website and examine best practices for each…

Read the rest here >

Posted at 11:03am and tagged with: web-content-strategy, content,.

Content 101
I went to school with a lot of furniture designers. They made beautiful things. But they’d get pretty caught up in techniques—dovetail joints, lamination, etc.—and end up making pieces that simply afforded them the opportunity to use those techniques. You’d sometimes look at the results and wonder who would actually use them now that they were built. Furniture is meant to support and hold things; bookshelves for books, desks for paperwork and tools, tables for meals, beds, chairs and couches for people. A good piece of furniture is designed for its function, and as such may use some of those fancy techniques designers crave to try. Web design has the same relationship between technique and purpose, and like furniture, websites have one basic function: to support and hold content.
But content is still a pretty mysterious thing to many people. Everyone gets that it’s important; talking about content in terms of how important it is tends to elicit all kinds of specific questions, like, “What kinds of content?” “How much content?” “Can I use content from other websites?” and many more. And frankly, we have tons of content about content on our website that, in the aggregate, will answer all these questions. But in this article, I want to go back to the basics and look at the various kinds of content you might create for your website and examine best practices for each…
Read the rest here >