Content Strategy Interviews

Elizabeth McGuane Content designers are word nerds by nature. Like many other craftspeople who are passionately immersed in their work, they can forget to step back and fully articulate what we are doing. Elizabeth McGuane has addressed this issue for the craft of content design. Her new book, Design by Definition, sets out the linguistic, rhetorical, and grammatical elements of content design and shows how they work together in design projects. We talked about: her work as a UX director at Shopify the origins of her book in a talk she delivered at a design leadership conference her writing process and how it relates to conversational design an overview of the structure of the book her transition from content design to design leadership the enduring strength of the relationships between visual and words people a great story about the utility and importance of metaphor in design work the importance of being thoughtful about naming things - and the idea that "words mean things" the importa