Excellent article by @HeyMikeWills on @alistapart — one that made me think about some of the content model/design system issues I’ve encountered at large orgs in a different way! https://alistapart.com/article/a-content-model-is-not-a-design-system/
I’ve talked a lot about the dangers inherent in building a content model around visual design/interaction components — it even came up at last week’s @MelContentStrat meetup! But @HeyMikeWills gave me a new appreciation for how it happens.
It’s easy for folks on the content side of things to assume that a UX or design team is simply imposing “their way”, but the far more common scenario is that teams and individuals do their best in the conceptual frames they’re most familiar with.
The real challenge — at least in my experience — is that design and content are deeply inter-related in every final artifact seen by a user. So simply ignoring the stuff we think belongs to the design “layer” doesn’t necessarily result in a semantically rich content model…
Especially on projects where the content has high levels of editorially-controlled variation in structure, sandblasting away “presentational intent” from the content can result in something that’s actually less effective and harder to apply well across multiple channels.
Getting content architecture and communications teams well-versed in semantic structure in the same room as a design systems team — getting the two groups to talk about the ‘whys’ and the communication intent behind design variation — that’s where a lot of magic happens.
The design system & content model have to work in concert; turning editorial/communication intent into semantic data (that the design system can effectively interpret to make visual presentation decisions) is tough work but critical at the scale @HeyMikeWills talks about.