Content Designer and Writer are not synonyms
And why we care about that difference
A little while ago, I wrote an article about content design. The editor changed the title and replaced “Content Designer” with a “Writer”. Their point of view was that people don’t like these “new” terms and that people don't know what content design means.
That’s fine. And completely valid.
Except, that it was still misleading and wrong to replace it with “writing.”
Content Design is a rapidly growing profession in the UK, particularly in the public sector, and speedily spreading to the private sector. There are a few other branches of this. Sometimes, the same job is called UX writer — but at other times UX writer can also blend in with Interaction Designer.
Content Strategist is another thing — and while Content Designers can and often do low-level content strategies, content strategist’s job normally is to plan a high-level content strategy for the entire organisation.
Content designers do spend a lot of time on words. But we are not writers.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a writer — but I do different things as a writer. I am writing this article because I am a writer. I write short stories, essays, poems and novels because I am a writer. I write in my journal. I write a great…
