BlogmyQuery – BMQ

Everyone is talking about content. Googling the phrase “content strategyâ€� retrieves almost 50 million results — a clear indicator that interest in content is very much in the zeitgeist. By the time you read this, I expect that number will have grown even higher.

But I also suspect that the substance of the talk would be quite different if content were truly respected. I believe this because the way we talk about content is beginning to sound a lot like the way we talk about money.

The Content Bubble

The trouble with this is that we don’t really get money, either. Few are foolish enough to say it aloud, but the actions of many betray a single fallacy that remains the pernicious root of recurring fiscal irresponsibility: that with enough money, any problem can be solved. Removed from crisis, we know this to be untrue. We’ve seen it. We’ve lived through it. Yet, we continue to obsess over how much we have and how much more we think we need.

Money, however, is not simply a quantitative measure of units — a figure that can be repeatedly plugged into an equation until it produces something positive. Money is a representation of value. It is a symbol — not a quantitative measure, but a qualitative one. Indeed, the concept of value is a chimera; it evades objective meaning just as readily from one person to another as it does for the same person from one context to another.

Consider movie tickets: Breaking down a $10 ticket to its cost per minute — roughly 11 cents for a two-hour picture — gets you no closer to a true valuation of the movie than assuming its initial production costs are a relevant indicator. After all, could anyone seriously argue that its $200 million price tag made the phenomenally bad film 2012 better than The King’s Speech, an Academy Award-winning independent production that cost only $15 million? Neither a movie’s length nor its cost can predict value, at least as far as the consumer is concerned. But after the last frame fades from view, ask any moviegoer about value and you’ll certainly get strong responses. Duration alone doesn’t satisfy. Quality will be the subjective basis on which people decide whether seeing a film is worth $10. That much is plain to viewers, yet elusive to creators who have other pressures in formulating their expectations of success.

As this simple example shows, when it comes to money, we could certainly stand to distance ourselves from a units-based perspective and consider the story that a qualitative perspective tells. One day, I imagine, it will be clear that our insistence on focusing only on the quantitative was at least in part responsible for the mess we ended up in back in 2008. We may wish for a formula to solve our financial woes, but we know that they are rooted in our system of value, not in our system of measure.

Sadly, the same thing is happening in marketing. Whereas a disconnect between money and value has created disastrous fiscal bubbles, a disconnect between content and value is inflating a bubble of its own. Content — today’s currency of attention — has taken the place of money as a panacea. To be sure, vanity is also a factor here. The visibility that an individual or group can have today as a result of content is unprecedented, motivating production when silence might be wiser. But I am more interested here in exploring the inflation of content’s business value than the inflation of egos. After the last recession, we learned enough about bubbles to be able to watch this one inflate from the inside.

As I write this, I’m overwhelmed by content — everything from blogs to books — by marketers, social scientists and others, who are studying in detail the expanding content bubble from their unique points of view, fascinated by the transformative force of creativity on society, especially of course on marketing, but perhaps discounting the fact that they write from within it. Yet writing about the content bubble from within the content bubble is not producing the criticism it should. The complexity of content surely merits study, but my simple understanding of what is happening is this: Because we can create content, we do.

In the first chapter of my new book, The Strategic Web Designer, I set the stage by asking the question, “What is the Web?� and taking the “scenic route� to the answer, however subjective it may be. But I suppose a more accessible definition could be that the Web simply is content. In an article written for SEED magazine about our struggle to manage the information we’ve produced (among other things), Iris Vargas accounts for the almost incomprehensibly large corpus of digital content in the world:

“As of January 2010, the total amount of digital content that humans had collectively produced was estimated at 1 zettabyte. To put this into perspective, the letter “zâ€� in a standard Word document amounts to roughly 1 byte. A typed page comes to about 2,000 bytes. A high-resolution photograph? 2 million bytes, or megabytes. Add six more zeros and you get two terabytes — the equivalent of all the information contained in the U.S. academic research library. Another six zeros (we’re now at 18) brings us to the exabyte. Five exabytes, according to some scholars, could store all the words ever spoken by human beings. One thousand exabytes equals one zettabyte, the total amount of digital content in the world as of this time last year.”

One zettabyte sure does sound impressive, but its meaning is still elusive. We easily understand megabytes and gigabytes — even terabytes — and we can visualize the space they require by thinking of the portable hard drives we carry around. But envisioning a zettabyte? I’m not sure I can do that in the same way. That’s where Eli Pariser comes in. In his fascinating book The Filter Bubble, he offers a bit more detail on the specific kinds of content that account for these numbers:

“We are overwhelmed by a torrent of information: 900,000 blog posts, 50 million tweets, more than 60 million Facebook status updates, and 210 billion e-mails are sent off into the electronic ether every day. Eric Schmidt likes to point out that if you recorded all human communication from the dawn of time to 2003, it’d take up about 5 billion gigabytes of storage space. Now we’re creating that much data every two days.”

Accounting for the kinds of content that make up this massively growing corpus is helpful — I know what a typical blog post looks like. Granted, much of the content that Vargas and Pariser mention (such as status updates, emails and the like) is not typically what we’d consider Web content, but enough of it is to infer a sobering point: The Web does not need any more content.

And yet, content is the point of every website. For those who design things for the Web, this provides a bit of a paradox, doesn’t it? Amidst a glut of content, one is left to question: What is it all for?

The True Cost(s) Of Content

Our collective prolificacy makes at least one thing quite clear: We value content. Or, at least we think we do. Gaining insight into value, its subjectivity notwithstanding, has always been the pursuit of advertising. And today, the assumption of the value of content — undifferentiated as it is — has been enough to create a new “currencyâ€� in marketing (or, to employ a historical metaphor more fitting of the frenzy let loose by Web 2.0, a new Gold Rush). In scrambling to get a piece of the action, we build our marketing strategies upon the same logic of “moreâ€� that failed to keep financial collapse at bay: If we create enough content, people will pay attention to us and line up, ready to buy.

But content isn’t free; even lousy content costs something. And if a balance sheet doesn’t include a budget line for content creation, then it’s not detailed enough. Someone is paying for it, in time.

In this regard, content marketing has taken many of its cues from the wrong source: print publishing. The publishing industry — magazines, especially — has been propped up by advertising, which is problematic on two levels. The first is that advertising-subsidized publishing avoids the reality of the true cost of content. Before it even reaches the reader, content gets distorted in value. Without some advertising, readers would have to pay the full cost — something that publishers at some point believed would be impossible, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. This leads to the second problem: that a system that has always depended on subsidies will tend to carve the path of least resistance. Rather than slowly wean off advertising and increase the cost to the reader, it will depend more heavily on advertising and reduce the cost to the reader.

That is, until the ratio reaches an imbalance and readers begin to question why they are paying to see ads. This is a simple law of… well, economics. Before the bubble pops, readers will accept that advertisers have subtle, unspoken editorial control. But as soon as the tipping point is reached, where advertising volume supersedes everything else, readership will begin to drop for one simple reason: readers’ sense of value has been violated.

In 2008, when the overall market experienced a significant decline, magazine advertising dropped by almost 12%. That may not sound like much, but when you consider that only 42 magazines saw an increase in advertising of any kind that year, the dramatic reality of the situation becomes clearer. In fact, Folio Magazine pointed out that it was the “biggest dropoff since 2000, the earliest year comparative PIB numbers are available.�

I personally remember receiving a much slighter than usual issue of Advertising Age in 2009 and chuckling at a sticker placed over the masthead that read, “Marketing in a Recession: It might be only 28 pages, but it’s jam-packed with good advice.� Though I was aware that the previous issues’ bulk was inflated by ads, not by more content, picking up the newly lean and austere 25-page issue certainly made me question my subscription. Advertising, it seems, not only has played an integral role in the economics of publishing, but has also created an illusion of health. I had to see AdAge reduced to almost nothing in order to realize that, for me, the value hadn’t been there for quite some time.

Unfortunately, the imbalance between advertising and content intrinsic to the print publishing industry has not substantially changed in its online form. In fact, it’s gotten worse. Just about every mass media website has an immediately obvious imbalance of ads and content. Take a moment to open an article from your favorite website — you know, The Huffington Post, I Can Has Cheezburger, Perez Hilton or Engadget (which, for better or for worse, are the most popular destinations on the Web today) — and notice how the page is filled mostly with peripheral stuff that has very little to do with the article on the page.

All you have to do is glance at these tiny screenshots to see the obvious imbalance:

“Stuff,â€� by the way, isn’t meant to be casual; it should be the new standard term for content that is carelessly stuffed into every last pixel available to it. After all, when I use the word “content,â€� advertisements, social media widgets and lures to even more (supposedly related) content aren’t what I have in mind at all. Nonetheless, by force of volume, stuff is evidently what the publishers value more than content. Surveying pages like these, you certainly shouldn’t conclude that enabling users to read is high up on the priority list for online publishers, either. Nor are many other things that readers — or designers, for that matter — hold sacred.

If publishers don’t care whether their websites’ content is read, what do they care about? It’s simple: they care about clicks, because clicks validate advertising. Mass media publishers know that their websites receive such a high volume of traffic that crowding their pages with as many opportunities for users to click makes statistical sense. When hundreds of thousands of users access a Web page on a daily basis, it’s highly probable that a significant number of them will click a link (any link will do) that either prolongs their visit or sends them elsewhere via a paid advertisement.

Both scenarios are valuable to the publisher. A click on an ad… well, that’s just easy money; a click to another page on the website just increases the chance that the visitor will eventually click on an ad. At this level, it simply doesn’t matter whether the visitor’s experience with the content is satisfying. For publishers, it is about volume — that’s all. The more visitors their websites get, the more money they will make. This is shock and awe; the special ops happen behind the scenes, and there’s no hero stuff going on. It’s number crunching and content farming all the way up.

It might sound cynical, but quality couldn’t factor any less than it does in the content strategy of most mass media. This isn’t just true on the Web. The statistical value of volume is at the heart of cable television programming, as well. Cable news, especially, employs the same shotgun tactics of the website publishers I’ve been describing, except that instead of measuring the value of viewer attention by page views and clicks, they measure it by the amount of time viewers remain dialed in to their broadcast.

By creating the illusion that important news is happening all the time — so much so that a perpetual feed of news runs at the bottom of most programs, while the rest of the screen is divided Brady Bunch-style into smaller boxes of talking heads, social media commentary and, of course, sponsored messages — cable news captures us in a steady yet unsatisfying trance and leads us on with repeated promises that the really important stuff is “coming up, just after this.â€�

Image source.

Television has the added advantage of being able to speak, literally, to both viewers and listeners, simultaneously weaving complex and unrelated audio and visual messages in and out of its programming, while our brains filter through only the information that is relevant to us. Unfortunately for readers’ attention, that just doesn’t work well on the Web.

Yet, the advertising-subsidized publishing model carried over from print to Web has worked as well as those who profit from it require. In fact, it has worked so well that advertising-subsidized content has reached an inflection point at which the more apt phrase is content-subsidized advertising. But the term you’re likely more familiar with is one I used earlier: “content farming,â€� the process of creating content with such great prolificacy — if not promiscuity — that it becomes purely a platform for advertising.

Put simply, a content farm is distinguished by its prioritization of advertising opportunity over quality of content — a disingenuousness made clear to any user who arrives at one from a search, only to find its articles too brief, too promotional or just too stupid to be useful. Just as there is no such thing as unlawful stupidity, there are, of course, no regulations against stupidity online. Adam Gopnik, commenting in the New Yorker on the “cognitive exasperationâ€� of the online experience, puts it in terms I immediately connected with:

“Our trouble is not the over-all absence of smartness but the intractable power of pure stupidity, and no machine, or mind, seems extended enough to cure that.”

Nevertheless, Google will try — the irony of its effort notwithstanding. Though the minds at Google have taken a clear stand against content farming — and, implicitly, for the machine arbitration of quality — by updating its algorithm to pinpoint its harvest, content farming is actually a logical extrusion of what Google created in the first place.

This entire system — the complex interweaving of consumer demand for content and various industries’ demands for consumer attention — as far as it exists online, has been perpetuated by search engines. Because search engines are best suited to index words, written content has become the focus of marketing.

You’ve no doubt heard the very popular marketing motto that epitomizes this: “Content is king.� I, for one, couldn’t think of a worse catchphrase. Forgiving the sense of entitlement engendered by the word “king,� shouldn’t a phrase like this be aspirational instead, linking content and value in a way that causes us to reach for something bigger than ourselves, better and more true, rather than complacently accepting a slave economy in which we almost certainly exist at the bottom?

While nothing is inherently wrong with profitably matching user interest to content — specifically, in the various ways in which Google does so — the absence of value as an essential and reliable factor in the equation, as well as the fact that the structure of this economy is strongest when content is text, makes for the instability we are experiencing. Indeed, it has led me to question numerous times, for myself and my clients, whether written content truly is the best way to represent expertise.

Working Content

There are, in fact, plenty of instances in which the written content model is undeniably inadequate. With a few exceptions, most consumer products are not easily marketed with much text. Typically, consumers prefer to let products “speak for themselvesâ€� both in usage and in researching their performance in reviews — which, of course, are found in abundant supply on the Web — rather than defer to what the maker has to say about their wares. In most cases, our aversion to being sold to is so strong that we struggle to believe the seller even when we believe in the value of their product!

For instance, do the Marriott and Skittles really need blogs?

Image source.

Those in the health-care industry might also perceive reasons to take up content strategies of their own, but often locality and emergency are the primary factors in a consumer’s choice of care providers, rather than researched, advance consideration. Similarly, utility-type services — plumbers, electricians, mechanics and cleaners — are more likely to be selected on the basis of what is nearby, immediately available and affordable, rather than any pitch that a blog or newsletter may provide. That isn’t to say that some form of content shouldn’t occupy a piece of the overall marketing strategy; there may be opportunities to use audio, video and social media that could be quite effective, while not being the lead marketing initiative.

On the other hand, there are instances in which written content marketing works quite well. At the products end of the business spectrum, those manufactured for businesses (rather than consumers), are typically heavily researched by buyers — who make active use of search engines to do so — before being purchased. Case studies, white papers, blog posts and other articles can satisfy the researcher’s need for sharable, decision-reinforcing information, especially if they are enabling a buying decision that will ultimately be made by someone else. The same dynamic exists within any “knowledge industryâ€� service. For professionals in design, advertising, marketing, public relations, law or finance, the essential intangibility of their expertise must be carefully described in depth in diverse ways to qualify the specific nature of what they do and for whom they are best suited to do it.

I list these considerations in order to point out that our role as strategic advisors to our clients is not to promulgate the latest marketing practices but to diagnose their needs and prescribe the best solution. Content marketing, though essential to the success of some enterprises, is not the best fit for others. Naturally, our own fraught experience in employing content marketing for ourselves may be instructive of that point as well.

To many designers, marketers and other advertising professionals, content marketing presents many challenges, the most dire of which is so rarely discussed that most don’t realize it exists until they’ve struggled (if not failed) to create content for so long that they’re ready to give up for good. The problem is that, when all is said and done — when we’ve accepted that writing content and optimizing it for search engines is critical to expressing expertise on the Web in a way that increases qualified, likely-to-convert traffic to your website — many of us never wanted to be writers in the first place!

Not every expert wants to write. Yet somehow, we’ve found ourselves facing the prospect of spending more and more of our time creating content that describes what we do than doing that actual thing we do best, whether it be design or something else. It is this conflict, in concert with other factors — those I’ve explored so far in this essay having to do with the glut and occasional misappropriation of content, as well as the limited mental bandwidth we each have to filter useful signal from the noise — that often predetermines the parabolic trajectory of many a content marketing plan. What begins with a burst of enthusiasm and creativity rises to an early peak, only to plummet just as fast as it began in rapid stages, from exhaustion to frustration, hopelessness, then bitterness. In the end, in the dysphoric coda, one questions everything: “I’m a designer. Why am I doing this?â€�

If you have asked that question, whether in a similar struggle or something a bit less dramatic, you are not alone. While some have discovered an affinity for writing and gladly added it to their repertoire, many once-confident designers contend greatly with it, the strain coloring the rest of their professional practice and giving them a feeling of inadequacy that only builds with the decline of their energy.

The rise and fall of the content marketer will almost certainly lead to a redefinition of the role of content within marketing, as well as a redistribution of labor that more closely corresponds to the reality that not everyone is a writer, just as not everyone is a designer. Search engines, which provided the inception of this new writing industry, will also likely provide a needed transition to something more sustainable. As the technology of today is optimized to interpret meaning and expertise from indexable text, the technology of tomorrow will be capable of doing the same thing with content in less tangible forms. Authority algorithms will process sound, video, social media and any other data relevant to discerning expertise — such as tenure, revenue, growth, recommendations, professional certifications — in addition to text, reducing the inordinate pressure on individuals today to make what was once a peripheral discipline in their profession a central one.

Practical Content

In the meantime, creating content remains a challenge we must address practically. If you don’t want to do something, you’re likely to either struggle doing it at all or struggle doing it consistently and effectively. As I have already discussed, not everyone has the desire to create marketing material, which presents a dilemma to content marketers working today: Those who should do it are often least likely to do it well.

A solution to this predicament is unlikely to present itself spontaneously, nor is any content strategy alone airtight enough to keep creators from struggling. The key is to understand the different roles necessary to fulfill a content strategy in a sustainable way. In her excellent book The Elements of Content Strategy, Erin Kissane stresses the importance of discerning between those who conceive the strategy and those who create the content as a means of preserving quality and output over time:

In its purest form, content strategy does not produce content. It produces plans, guidelines, schedules, and goals for content, but not the substance itself, except inasmuch as examples are required to illustrate strategic recommendations. But if you have the ability to create good content, you’ll have a real advantage over content strategists who do not.

This is a significant distinguishing factor that is often overlooked. In fact, while many of the firms I have consulted have enthusiastically adapted the content-marketing approach to their website and quickly conceived of a feasible content strategy, just as many have failed to consistently implement it. This is largely due to a lack of leadership.

A successful content strategy relies less upon the content itself — although that element certainly is essential — than upon a person who is able to inspire those who create the content, coalescing their unique voices around a consistent point of view, even as the stream of conversation around them ebbs and flows. Depending on the size of the team, this person may or may not create content themselves; a truly hard line between roles might not be necessary unless the content output is great enough to warrant one. In my firm, for example, I perform this role, among others, while also producing plenty of content of my own. The more important facet of this role is the authority and responsibility that accompanies it. This person, regardless of the title they carry, must view the direction of the firm’s content marketing as being a major part of their job description. While I came down hard on the print publishing industry for the ways in which its economic foundation devalues content, its editors in chief — whose production, if any, is secondary to their leadership — provide the best example of how this role should function.

For those who create content, of course, the content itself is a priority. But no single piece of content, no matter how excellent, will be as successful as a steady, long-term flow of quality content. This is why the success of any content marketing strategy is achieved by committed leadership.

While the leader’s job is first and foremost to ensure that the content’s point of view remains consistent with the firm’s purpose and that quality is preserved, various management techniques will also be critical to sustaining the production of fresh material. The ways of dealing with the complexity of content marketing will vary greatly according to the size of the organization, but two particular techniques are essential to teams of all sizes: establishing a workflow (the process by which content is conceived, executed, evaluated, approved and delivered) and establishing an editorial calendar (which identifies topics, content types, authors and deadlines in advance). The various points of the workflow process, especially those that place quality control barriers between the content creators and the websites on which their content will eventually be found, are those that require the team to be comprised of a diversity of roles. Kristina Halvorson’s book Content Strategy for the Web is a comprehensive enough treatment of the topic to serve as a primary handbook for anyone involved in content marketing, whether leading, managing or producing.

Though strengthened by proactive, intentional leadership and management, your content marketing strategy will still be vulnerable to something that is mysterious enough to slip through the cracks of any well-conceived machine: the creative process of producing the content itself. Writing, especially, is difficult to do well and often. As discussed earlier, it requires a level of focus and investment that sometimes comes into direct conflict with the job you’d rather do, whether that is design or something else. One solution may be to employ dedicated writers, but few marketing teams have that luxury. The reality is that, for now, many designers will have to write and create other forms of content in order to sustain their livelihoods. It is not within the scope of this piece to offer advice on how to write well — there are many fine resources on that topic — but I can share some insight by invoking what I call the nonwritten disciplines of writing.

There are four nonwritten disciplines that make for successful professional writing: reading, planning, research and editing. None can be left out; each is just as important as the other. But if I had to prioritize one, it would be reading.

Reading is a discipline that many books on writing strangely leave out. (The other three — planning, research and editing — are all essential pieces of the content workflow that are covered in great detail by some of the books mentioned in this essay, including my own.) Yet, there is no writing without reading. Perhaps better said, there is no good writing without reading. If you want to write, or need to write — the two need not be in agreement — then you must make reading a part of your life. (If you are thinking to yourself, “I don’t like to read,â€� then I promise you right now that’s not true; you just have yet to find what you like.)

Any aspiring writer, whatever their purpose, must actively seek out content, in any form, that covers the topics they’re interested in, even if they do not need to cover those topics in their writing. Reading is about exposing yourself to the ideas of others in order to enrich your own thinking — which need not be truly novel to merit writing about. There is an art to revealing ideas through the written word, one that good writers practice primarily with restraint, reserving the majority of their knowledge as an unwritten foundation for what they actually put to words — the tip of the iceberg. Because reading will supply much of the knowledge that makes up the background of your writing, it is indispensable.

It’s Content All the Way Down

I began this essay by looking at the staggering volume of content available on the Web and by challenging our sense of its value and purpose. When content is seen purely as a means to an end, as a unit as divorced from value as our monetary currency so often is, it will tend toward an articulation that is so cheap as to have no hope of achieving even its ill-conceived goals. On the other hand, when content is not focused enough on a concrete goal — even one that is not particularly motivating to a writer, such as advertising — it can just as easily head in the opposite direction, self-indulgently alienated from its purpose and with no future other than online obscurity. It’s not that no one reads purposeless content (very few do, though), but that no one takes action after reading it. Eliciting action, whether it be buying a product, service or even just an idea, is a worthy purpose for any piece of content — and one that should shape how it is conceived, produced and promoted.

Promotion, of course, presents plenty of difficulties of its own, far too many to cover adequately here. This entire essay, from the admonition to restore content to its own gold standard to the process by which the purpose of content should align with the purpose of the business, could be reframed to address the content that we create to promote our content. Indeed, our email blasts, comments on forums, message boards and other blogs, as well as our social media engagement, is all, in the end, content. Yet, it has a slightly different purpose. All of these kinds of promotion, insofar as they are done to increase awareness of your content, share that goal of eliciting action. But in this case, the action is not “buyingâ€� anything but simply agreeing to offer attention to what you have to say. The job of promotion should be to enable your content to do its job. When the relationship between content and promotional content is reversed — when it’s all promotion — ugly things happen. It certainly doesn’t take much time for an intelligent person to see when the emperor has no clothes, or for that person to spread the word far and wide. In that regard, it bears consideration that what we say to get attention is very different from what we say once we have it.

This essay is an excerpt of The Strategic Web Designer: How to Confidently Navigate the Web Design Process, by Christopher Butler (HOW Books, 2012).

(al) (il)

© Christopher Butler for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

Imagine you are in a classroom. Let’s say a high school classroom. You’re sitting at your desk, listening to your favorite teacher—the one who inspired you, the one who got you excited about that thing you love for the first time.

You’ve stopped taking notes because your body just can’t quite function normally when your mind is being blown. You don’t feel the pen in your hand, or the surface of the desk under your arms. You’re somewhere in between your body and the blackboard. That’s the magic of learning; it’s transportational.

Now, deep breath.

Back to reality.

Perhaps your learning experiences were not like this, but I hope they were. And if they were, did it ever occur to you in those moments that you were being sold something? That the moment was approaching when you’d be asked to sign on the dotted line or open your wallet? When you’d kick yourself for being fooled into thinking that your teacher was offering something to you for free? When you’d learn to stifle the desire and ability to trust someone?

Of course not. What you received came without strings attached; it was a free gift of knowledge to change you, to shape you, to edify you. Not to compel you to buy something.

After all, your teacher wasn’t a marketer.

Right?

Or, was he?

It’s worth asking at this point: What, exactly, is marketing? Here I won’t quote a definition—not just because we’re all capable of looking it up ourselves, but because it really doesn’t matter anymore what the “official” definition of marketing is. Marketing, in its ubiquity, is something we all live and breath. We know what it is, though we may struggle with articulating it with any meaningful precision. In our culture, the distance between marketing and creativity is virtually nonexistent.

Every bit of that space has been filled with the promotional. What were once barely overlapping magisteria have become fully integrated. It’s not enough that we make beautiful things, or have brilliant ideas, or even have powerful experiences anymore; they’re hardly real to the world until they’ve been shared in some digital burst of “Here I am, you should pay attention to me.”

Life and work has become noisy with marketing. And the noisier it gets, the noisier it gets, because we’ve bought into the lie that nothing cuts through noise better than the right kind of noise. But noisy marketing—of the parade for a naked emperor kind—is cheap; there is no there there, and we all end up feeling cheap for looking, anyway.

There is a better way, of course. But the better way requires that we get as far away from this sort of marketing as possible. In fact, it might be better that we call it something else entirely, because no one ever says, “I want to be a marketer when I grow up.” So, why not call it education? If you ever experienced the free gift of education—whether or not as I dramatized it above—let that be your model for marketing. For your sake; for the sake of all of us.

Inception

Disparaging marketing is easy, isn’t it? What I just wrote came naturally; it flowed out of my experience struggling with my own value for privacy and the frequency with which it is violated, coupled with my job representing a company and the frequency with which I have to market our services. I know the kind of marketing I don’t like, and to do it differently is easier said than done. Frankly, it’s just far easier to do marketing than to have marketing done to you. Yet, there is no Golden Rule for marketing—market unto those as you would have them market unto you. Shouldn’t there be such a rule? There can be.

It starts with doing something good.

Quality

There is nothing wrong with selling things, or even with making lots of money selling things. There is something wrong, though, with selling a product or service that you know is not worth its price. So there are some questions we must ask if we are to follow any “golden rule” of marketing: Do I believe in what I’m selling? Is it good for people? Is it worth what I am asking people to pay for it?

Could you imagine a teacher answering “No” to any of these questions? “No, I don’t believe in what I teach.” “No, what I teach is not good for people.” “No, what I teach isn’t worth the time my class requires.” Could any teacher with integrity answer no to these questions and still manage to show up for class every Monday morning? I doubt it.

Alan Jacobs, writing for The Atlantic about the role of quality in the shifting sands of business success, had this to say:

“What goes around comes around; what goes up must come down. Microsoft has been gradually drifting to the margins of our tech consciousness; Google is scrambling to find a way to compete with Facebook. Everything moves faster in a wired world, including the pace of change in business… A decade from now the landscape of the technology business will sure look very different than it does today. Maybe by 2022 Apple and Amazon will be marginal companies once again—underdogs that I can feel good about supporting.”

What shifts the sands of the business landscape isn’t marketing, it’s quality. Apple rose to the top because it made outstanding products, not “just fine” ones with outstanding advertising. Microsoft, on the other hand, stumbled not because its advertising is terrible—though it really is—but because its products weren’t very good, either. And as for Amazon, Amazon rose to the top by offering a level of service that shocked shoppers: an easy to navigate store, with an unfathomably large inventory, and delivery that exceeded anyone’s reasonable expectations for speed. It reset those expectations.

If Amazon fails, it will fail because either someone else comes along who can do better—unlikely as that may be—or because we decide that we don’t feel comfortable with the costs of the level of service they offer. Many right now are already questioning that, whether inexpensive and immediate delivery are worth the working conditions that make it possible. Marketing will probably try to change our minds. It may even work on some of us, for a little while. But if failure is to be avoided, marketing will have little to do with it.

If you can do something truly good, you won’t have much of a marketing challenge. If you can keep doing something good without something bad subsidizing it, marketing will take care of itself.

Positioning

But what if someone else does exactly the same thing you do? What if you can’t beat their price? What if you can’t outserve them? This is typically where “savvy” marketing comes in. When labels carry claims that either overemphasize a non-differentiator so that it seems like one, or straight up lie.

Imagine the educational corollary: “The same easy A, now with twice the History!” or “Become a Quantum Physicist, Results Guaranteed!” Preposterous.

It’s a whole lot easier to avoid resorting to manipulation if you don’t have any real competitors. Competitors force each other to make less meaningful but more manipulative distinctions between one another. If you think you’ve got the “good” thing down, consider your positioning. Are you actually different? If not, how will you survive without being sleazy?

Attract, Inform, Engage

So, let’s say you’ve got the quality and positioning stuff worked out. You do something good that nobody else does. Fantastic. That is, assuming people know about you. Taking a Field of Dreams approach—if you build it, they will come—won’t work. If you build it, and they know about it, they will come. But even if they come, you’ve got to make sure they understand what it is that they’re coming for. And then you’ve got to make them want to stick around. This is a three-step process: attracting prospects, properly informing them, engaging with them. That is what marketing should be all about. Attract, inform, engage; not attract, mislead, compel.

If you are well positioned, attraction is much easier. Imagine three hot-dog vendors at a baseball game. Two wander up and down the stands, shouting, “Hot dogs! Get your delicious hot dogs here!” Their success is going to come down to luck—who happens to be closest to the right people. But the third vendor sticks to the low seats. He’s shouting, too, except he’s got different dogs to sell: “Low-fat hot dogs! Eat two for the fat of one!” Now who do you think will have an easier time selling hot dogs? The more specific your audience is, the easier it is to attract them.

If you can attract a specific audience, informing is easy, too. You already know something about them and what they need. If you have a worthy solution to that need, all you have to do is tell them about it. That’s where the teaching comes in: Start generally—Introduction to Your Problem, then Our Solution 101—and be prepared to give them more detail as they need it. Incrementally informing, by the way, will also take care of engagement. Give them some, they’ll want more. Ask any engaged student sitting in Advanced Trigonometry 3 why they are there and you’ll likely hear many similar answers, all having to do with being attracted and informed by someone special back in their beginner days.

Know Your Role

If you make things, it’s difficult to avoid marketing. But if you can do it the good way—attracting, informing, and engaging—to serve that good thing you do, then that thing we’ve wanted to avoid no longer looks so bad. And even then, “marketer” is just one of many roles that people who make things play in some capacity. But it’s a role that should always be subservient to your primary one: making and doing good things. To keep that role connected to the good things we do, I’ve used teaching as a metaphor.

I know it’s abstract, but if there is one single characteristic of good teachers that could stand to make everything we do—as well as how we market it—better, it’s caring. Good teachers care. They care about the material. They care about how they teach it. They care about their students. If we care too—about what we do, how we do it, and who we do it for—then we’ll be OK.

Resisting the Dark Side

That’s the setup, anyway. But caring is hard. Caring requires a commitment to resisting the very things that currently seem to drive the culture of marketing—things like haste, deception, and even your own ego.

Slow Down

Slow down, please. Not everything needs to be right now. One thing I like to say that usually riles people up is that there are no marketing emergencies. Really. If there are, it’s because somebody screwed up or somebody’s expectations are out of whack.

But that doesn’t change the fact that other people feel differently. Open your email account and watch it fill before your eyes. Open Twitter and watch the nonstop flow of information push down your timeline. It’s incredible how rapid-fire online culture has become, and naturally, how marketing has followed suit. As marketing has become so predominantly digital, speed has become a defining characteristic of the experience. But when your blood pressure rises and you feel the anxiety of falling behind—that you should be blogging more, tweeting more, posting more on Facebook, Pinterest, and the like—ask yourself this: How good can it be if you’re producing so much of it so often?

Honesty

Honesty is the enemy of traditional marketing. It’s sad but true. It’s not because honesty isn’t possible in marketing, but that if companies were completely honest about their products and services—about how they’re made, what they do, their flaws, their shelf life, etc.—fewer people would buy them. That’s why creating illusions is so essential to marketing. But it only takes a tiny crack in the surface to destroy an illusion. As a colleague pointed out to me recently, a supermodel only has to stumble once before the illusions so central to fashion fall away and you are left with just people wearing clothes. If the quality is there, there is nothing to hide.

That’s the big-picture, but I think most honesty-erosion tends to happen on a smaller scale, where the line between truth and fiction can be pretty blurry. There’s a general impulse toward bending that line intentionally, one often motivated by our desire to bring attention to something we believe deserves it. Whether it’s a product, a service, or even a cause, we might be willing to “sex up the story” if doing so means bringing greater awareness to it.

This isn’t just a marketing problem, by the way. We do it when we believe the attention garnered by a thing or an idea or an injustice isn’t as big as it should be. Listen to the retraction issued by This American Life of Mike Daisy’s account of working conditions in Apple’s factories in China. Pay attention to how uncomfortable you feel. That discomfort is a measure of the distance between truth and fiction.

For the first year after graduating from college, I did freelance design work. I registered a business, created business cards, set up a website, the works. I wasn’t alone, either. Several classmates did the same thing, and we would often compare notes and even help each other get work from time to time. We learned all kinds of things by trial and error back then, but the one thing that left the greatest impression upon me had to do with how honest we were in describing ourselves. Every one of us made heavy use of the word “we” on our websites—though “we” was almost always just one person working from a room in a shared apartment—because we feared we wouldn’t be hired if it was clear that “we” was really “I,” a freelancer flying solo.

We believed that no matter how good our work was, we’d be ignored as individuals. So we created an illusion that we thought looked strong. “I” was just a kid on my laptop at a desk in his bedroom; “We” was a company, confident, experienced, secure. But that, of course, wasn’t true. I learned that there was no point in trying to convince potential clients of something other than that which would quickly become clear to them if they hired me. So, a simple rule: If you’re one person, never refer to yourself as “we.” That’s the kind of small-scale honesty we need to take seriously.

In, but not of

But let’s be realistic. Even if you change, you can’t expect everyone else to change too. It’s certainly possible that if enough people embrace a new way of doing things, the culture might shift overall, but that is unlikely to happen overnight.

The culture of online marketing is unhealthy—the lack of criticism of it is pretty astonishing to me—but the real tragedy is watching the forces of self preservation turn good people with good intentions into obnoxious, self-aggrandizing loudmouths that collect into BS echo chambers. Sometimes what you see accepted or celebrated around you is exactly what you shouldn’t do. I liked how Oliver Reichenstein put it in a post-SXSW tweet:

“Studied the SXSW talks to find out what not do as a speaker: 1. Don’t think you’re cool 2. Don’t preach 3. Don’t sell. 4. No false modesty.”

Why do we feel that the only way to survive is to do things like everyone else does? There’s no good reason for it. In fact, we’re all waiting for someone to pave the way for us by having the courage we don’t have, the courage to do something different. Why can’t you be one of those people? When it comes to doing the right thing, don’t wait for someone else’s courage to stand in for your own.

Ground control to _____

Remember those clumsy supermodels? They do us a favor when they stumble. They bring us back down to Earth, where we’re all just people wearing clothes. No matter how important we think we are, or how important we think the things we make or do are, we could all stand to stumble down the runway every once in a while. Especially when it comes to marketing.

A great example of this came in the recent blow-up over “Homeless Hotspots,” a campaign created by BBH (a marketing firm) that turned the homeless of Austin into roaming internet access points available to the throngs attending the South by Southwest conference. Needless to say, it was controversial. Plenty has been said about it—both in support and in criticism—but amidst the noise, one comment written by Thomas Wendt resonated most for me:

“In the end, everyone is full of shit—supporters and detractors—and it’s all a result of spectacle and denial. The entire system creates such dissonance that we lash out against it. We’re unable to reconcile the differences between image and the real, altruism and self-interest, trust and deception. So we gravitate toward poles: BBH is a charitable company or BBH is a lying capitalist institution. Of course, the truth in somewhere in between, but denial and self-deception keeps us from admitting it.”

Wendt’s post was titled, Staring Down the Spectacle, which really gets at the point: It is the culture—and the spectacle it creates—that is your adversary, not any specific action per se, nor any other person. Yet culture has a profound power to shape each of us, so just as much as we should scrutinize what we observe around us, we should bring equal scrutiny to what we observe within ourselves. When it comes to marketing, the most meaningful question I can ask at any point is, just how full of shit am I?

Guilty as Charged

I wrote this as an act of resistance, as a way of keeping myself from disappearing into the “dark side,” not as a prophet condemning from atop a mountain. I see myself struggling to maintain the integrity of an educational marketing model and I often don’t like what I see. But, I’ve also discovered that we must intentionally learn from examples—both good and bad ones. The bad ones are easy to study. We’re all close enough to them to do it. We’re among them. We may even be one of them. The question is whether we’re willing to do something about it.

(il)

© Christopher Butler for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

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 advocacyâ€� 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.

A Very Brief History of Content and Design

Long ago, when we humans first began writing things down, there wasn’t a clear difference between pictures and words. In the earliest examples of writing, symbols depicted nameable things — a bird, a mountain, fire, rain. You could combine a few pictograms to communicate something more sophisticated, but that got writers only so far. Some concepts are difficult to describe with images alone. The development of primitive accounting records, though, further abstracted writing.

In order to properly document the wealth and splendor of their kings, Sumerian scribes had to repeatedly etch up to hundreds of animal pictograms onto clay tablets. Cow after cow after cow. Sheep after sheep after sheep. You can imagine how extreme repetition would abstract the symbols they used: the simpler the character, the faster the etching.

On the left, an example of logographic writing. On the right, an example of syllabic writing. (Source: Wikipedia)

Even though the leap from logographic (i.e. symbols that represent words) and syllabic (i.e. symbols that represent sounds) writing to alphabetic systems that approximate what we would recognize today was a profound one — believe me, I just simplified around 2,500 years of the history of writing right there — we still had quite a way to go. After all, the earliest example of punctuation didn’t come until about 840 BCE, when the battle victories of a Jordanian ruler named Mesha were carved in stone for posterity.

Distinguishing between upper and lowercase letters didn’t happen until much, much later, and it didn’t really take off until literacy expanded greatly — say, after the printing press. Imagine reading anything today without capitalization or punctuation. But you’re not reading this for a history lesson. The story of writing is far too big to be told here. And really, I have no business telling it. Yet skimming the surface of history reveals a deeper relationship between images and words than we often realize.

Sometimes words are enough. Other times, they need accompaniment. Even the arrangement of words can carry meaning. Let’s look at a practical example.

Even Basic Formatting Carries Meaning

What you’re looking at above is a recipe for cookies. (Very delicious cookies, I might add.) I realize it’s difficult to read, but the fact that these three images are small enough to fit nicely on this page actually serves an important point.

Look at the image on the left. Can you make out what kind of information the text is conveying? It’s not impossible, but it will take you a bit of time and squinting at the words to figure out what they are about in general. But as you make your way to the right, the job gets progressively easier. The words haven’t changed, but the way they are formatted has. Formatting, which is really just the way information is organized and arranged on the page, is design in its most basic sense. So, you might also say that as the attention paid to the design of this recipe increases, the more immediately recognizable its content becomes — and the more useful it becomes to an aspiring baker.

The simple lesson of this recipe is that formatting is more than just an aesthetic, secondary treatment of information. Formatting in and of itself contains information that enables the reader to better perceive the nature of the text or, in other words, the kind of message it contains. In the case of this recipe, the cookies produced by any of the three versions would be equally good, but the likelihood that the cookies would be made at all depends directly on the recipe’s formatting. Most would not quickly recognize that the version on the left is a recipe at all; you’d probably recognize the one on the right immediately.

Anyone interested in communicating more effectively should reflect on the degree to which the format — or lack thereof — of their content supports or undermines the content’s message.

Fortunately, we’re pretty good at preserving formatting that is critical to the meaning of written content. If I put the best-formatted version of my recipe on the Web, I’d be confident that readers would see it that way whether they printed it out or read it off the screen. The basics of formatting — fonts, line breaks, numbered and bulleted lists, etc. — are easily implemented and transferred, regardless of the context.

But sometimes the design of a page carries meaning that is substantially visual and that is not so easily preserved because it’s not a matter of simple formatting. History again provides a helpful example.

One More Brief Trip Back in Time

The image below comes from one of the most well-known illuminated manuscripts, The Book of Kells, famous for an extravagance in visual detail found in very few manuscripts like it. Written in Latin, this Gospel book is believed to have been created sometime around the year 800 by Celtic monks living in the Abbey of Kells in Ireland.

What is immediately obvious is that this manuscript was not created merely to transmit the text contained therein. While the message of the text was central to the lives of the monks — religiously, culturally, even practically — the creation of the manuscript was an art that brought life to the book’s deeper meaning and its role in the tradition that coalesced around it. In other words, the role of design and imagery in the illuminated manuscripts was not one of formatting. It had less to do with utility — making reading easier — than with meaningful expression. Its entire purpose would be lost if the text and imagery were separated.

What the earliest writing, my cookie recipe and the illuminated manuscripts all have to teach us is that design — whether in the most basic features of a line of text or in the subtle juxtaposition of words and imagery — is integral to the transmission of meaning and cannot be isolated from the content.

Content And Design On The Web

So far, this all makes sense from the perspective of design philosophy. But how does the relationship between design and content play out in practice? To investigate this, I’d like to share several real-world examples of how context affects content — the examples I promised at the beginning of this article.

1. Interconnected

Interconnected is the personal website of Matt Webb, the CEO of Berg, a wonderful design studio in London. As you can see, Matt has kept his website’s design very minimal. In fact, besides the fact that Matt is a very interesting person and I’ve been cyberstalking him for years, I chose his website as my first example precisely because it’s so minimal. But let’s see what this same blog post looks like when I save it to read later in my Readability account.

As you can see, reading Matt’s blog in Readability, instead of on his website, is not a substantially different experience. The colors and typography are different, and Readability includes its own toolbar on the left; but really, nothing here has changed enough to alter Matt’s message.

Let’s compare one more tool: Safari’s Reader, which detects articles and enables visitors to read them in an isolated, attention-friendly overlay.

Again, no major differences here. Just as with Readability, Safari has altered the colors and typography. But because Matt’s website is so stark to begin with, the experience is remarkably stable across these different contexts.

But what about an article from a website with a much more developed design? How might my experience of the content change from the original context to Readability and Safari Reader?

2. Smashing Magazine

For my second example, I took a screenshot of an article I wrote for this website back in May 2010, “Holistic Web Browsing: Trends of the Future.� As you can see, Smashing Magazine’s design is relatively simple; but, unlike Matt Webb’s design, it includes many more images: a graphic menu at the top, a logo and, as is common in big publications, advertisements.

Let’s see how this article looks in Readability:

What’s immediately obvious is that Readability isolates the content in the main column and, in doing so, strips out just about everything else: the header, logo, navigation and sidebar content. It also removes the ads that Smashing Magazine runs in the content column at the top of articles, but leaves the “Advertisement� tag.

Safari Reader includes the ad in the content column. Other than that, the experience is very similar.

Other than the fact that both tools effectively un-brand Smashing Magazine’s content, there’s not a whole lot to complain about here. No essential elements are missing, and because Smashing Magazine’s authors know to keep the images in their articles very basic (i.e. image references only), there’s little need to worry about losing those aspects of the message that appear in image form.

3. Craig Mod

Craig Mod is another interesting person who has been doing a lot of thinking, writing, speaking and designing related to the content experience for some time now. I’ve chosen his website partly because an article of his is relevant to the discussion, but also because I was curious how his beautiful design would translate to a tool like Readability.

Before I show you this particular article, “Books in the Age of the iPad,� in Readability, I want to quickly share a couple of reasons why Craig’s design makes for a great reading experience. First, it has white space. A lot of it. The screenshot above shows only a small portion of the page. Follow the link above to see for yourself; the article has a single column of text and many high-quality images that Craig has arranged to fit seamlessly into both the article and the website. Nothing feels as if it doesn’t belong.

Secondly, the typography — from the large illustrated title at the top to the headings and two-column preamble — contributes to a mood of calm yet earnest thoughtfulness, which I really appreciate as I slowly make my way through Craig’s argument. He uses design to guide me at a very deliberate pace.

I could go on and on. Suffice it to say that Craig knows what he’s doing with his design. And while the website might appear similarly minimal to Matt Webb’s, the language of design is used very differently here. I’m a fan.

Above is the same article in Readability. At first glance, it doesn’t look too bad. As in the other examples, the typography has changed, as have some of the subtleties of Craig’s layout. But then I realized something: Readability excludes the entire preamble! Everything from “Print is dying…� to “This is a conversation…� is completely gone. I went back to the original page and saved it again in Readability just to double-check. Same thing. I triple-checked. Same thing. Also, look closely at the last paragraph in the screenshot above. For some reason, Readability doesn’t like Craig’s em dashes.

OK, I’ll save you the repetition and skip Safari Reader for this example. (It looks very much like the other two examples.)

Seeing Craig’s website in Readability was a disappointment. After seeing the other examples, I was prepared to lose his design sensibilities, but I wasn’t prepared to lose such a sizeable chunk of content. Clearly, the way Craig has laid out his page’s template doesn’t jibe with the code that Readability looks for to identify where a page’s main content begins and ends, and that’s not really anyone’s fault.

Readability should not — and could not, really — be expected to adapt to and interpret every conceivable way that a Web page can display content, nor should Craig have anticipated how Readability works when designing his website. It’s not about failure so much as about understanding that communication on the Web is done in a variety of ways.

But Wait! It’s Not Just About Pickiness…

Dwelling on the mostly minor differences between how these articles appear may seem overly picky. After all, it’s not like you can’t read them. But even the minor differences — whether a substitution of typography, a change in color or an omission of imagery — are meaningful to the designers who created the original environments in which these articles exist. In my experience, I’ve known plenty of developers who take a casual attitude to implementing designs, but I’ve never met a single designer who doesn’t consider even the smallest detail sacrosanct.

There is also an irony here worth noting. Tools like Readability — and I’m focusing on it mainly because it does reading advocacy the best — are very well designed. They speak the designer’s language by paying attention to details that usually only those who have worked with typography would consciously recognize. The rest of us just see the page and know that it looks beautiful and feels good to read. Designers recognize in Readability an appreciation of white space, proportion, typography and other essentials that are typically considered luxuries on the Web.

That’s why they are so excited about it. Nevertheless, elegant as it may be, Readability substitutes the deliberately unique design of an article with a one-size-fits-all boilerplate aesthetic. While I’m confident in the integrity and best intentions of Readability, I also question the dynamic that it potentially establishes: by adeptly harnessing the seductive power of good design, it attracts the very people who its functionality ultimately undermines.

What to do?

Content And Design In eBooks

Because being able to focus more precisely is the main reason to use reading-advocacy tools, it occurred to me that other content — besides articles written for regular print and Web publications — might present similar difficulties to this system we’re building around content portability. I can think of one huge category in particular that is experiencing the growing pains of the analog-to-digital transition: books.

I chose several books to test what I did with the Web pages: view them first in their “native� format (as printed volumes) and then in their “portable� format (as eBooks).

1. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer

In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer tells the story of a 9-year-old boy who embarks on a quest to learn more about a mysterious key left behind by his father, a victim of the 9/11 attacks. Foer experiments with image and text a great deal in this book, making for a perfect opportunity to see how the printed page translates to eBook format.

The scan above shows the first two pages of a chapter that “appears� to still be in draft form. I was immediately curious how the eBook would represent the red editorial marks in the text.

As you can see, the eBook doesn’t handle them very well. There doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to the characters that the eBook inserts to represent the edges of the red circles. Sometimes they’re parentheses, other times uppercase letter. Either way, the text is pretty difficult to read.

In case you were thinking, “Hey, that’s not so bad!�, above is a screenshot of the next page in the eBook, where things get considerably worse. Adding in slices of images of the original printed page doesn’t help.

2. The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall

The next example is The Raw Shark Texts, a strange mystery novel about memory and reality (among other things) by Steven Hall. The story takes place in a world much like our own, except that it is also home to “conceptual creaturesâ€� that feed on ideas. As I said, it’s a strange book — so strange that the text itself veers off into experimental visual oddities, too.

In the scan of the printed book above, I’ve isolated a calligram of a fish made of text (which makes sense — sort of — in the story). Let’s see how the eBook handles this.

In some ways, the eBook format handles Hall’s fish images better than Foer’s editorial markings. In particular, no junk characters are inserted in the text. But it’s not the greatest representation of what Hall had in mind. In the printed book, the “fossil fish reconstruction� occupies the entire page, with its description underneath. In the eBook version, the image is reduced in size and put on the same page as text that refers to an image not shown, while the “fossil fish reconstruction� footnote is bumped to the next screen.

Obviously, the eBook doesn’t stick with the printed version’s design — nor does it really try to. This makes for a more confusing reading experience.

3–4. The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester, and The Medium Is the Message by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore

Neither of these books is available as an eBook in the Kindle, iBooks, or Google Books marketplaces. An EPUB version of The Stars My Destination is floating around on the Web, but it is not an authorized version, so I don’t expect that it handles the original design with any reverence.

But both of these books serve as great examples of how the message can depend on more than just traditional text.

In one of the later chapters of The Stars My Destination (shown above), Bester’s protagonist experiences an almost psychedelic trip through time and space, which the book captures with an illustration of the words that adds a visual layer to the description, similar to concrete poetry.

Something like this could be easily preserved in an eBook by inserting images in the flow of text. But the particular words that Bester illustrates would have to be added as some kind of meta data in order for the text to be fully indexed and searchable.

Finally, what fusion of image and text is more relevant than The Medium Is the Message, by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore? You’ve probably already guessed that the title of this article is an homage to this book. The scan above (no, I didn’t accidentally reverse it — that’s actually how it is printed) is just one example of how the pages of the book are all uniquely designed to illustrate McLuhan’s text in a striking visual and typographic style. Fiore, by the way, is a graphic designer, not a writer, who reached out to McLuhan to collaborate on the book, specifically to explore how text and image can be combined to affect the consciousness of the reader.

If you’re looking for one book that in its very existence emphatically represents the diverse nature of content and pushes its boundaries far beyond text alone, this is it.

Am I Just Being Picky Again?

Maybe so. Like the Web pages that I looked at earlier, none of these eBooks have been adapted poorly enough from print to be impossible to read. After all, Google Books gives you the option to read both the scanned pages and the “flowing textâ€� version. So, in any of these situations, you do have alternatives. Of course, depending on your screen’s size, the scanned version might be less than optimal — you might have to scroll up and down so much that you’d be too annoyed to bother with it.

Not every book will suffer the analog-to-digital transition. Only those that subtly interweave text and image (and some even that embed illustrations in the text the traditional way) will slip through the cracks of what is, currently, a fairly simple system.

But what these eBooks continue to make clear — reinforcing our argument that emerged from tracing written language from its roots to today’s awkward technological transition — is that written communication is complex. More complex than just lines of text. Just because an author uses a variety of means of communication — including text, images, and images created from text — their book should not be disqualified from being made available in digital form, nor be handicapped when it is made available. After all, it’s not the book’s fault that our current approach to digitization favors works that adhere to a rigid distinction between text and image.

Content And Design In The Future

What these reading-advocacy systems need now is design advocacy — an expansion of the templates and tools that, on the one hand, honor the intended substance and meaning of the author’s text and that, on the other, don’t reduce the reader’s experience of content to one of merely processing text.

Coincidentally, GOOD Magazine just recently issued a challenge to its readers: redesign a news website using only images — no text allowed. The magazine doesn’t explain where this idea came from, but would it be a stretch to imagine that it signifies a boredom with text and a desire to return to our roots and explore communication with symbols again? Perhaps. I certainly look forward to seeing what GOOD’s readers come up with.

In the meantime, we all need to give serious thought to how design and content interact. I think portability is a great idea — see Cameron Koczon’s piece on “Orbital Contentâ€� for a focused argument on “content liberationâ€� — but it would be a shame to narrow down the designed content experience to only what can be easily translated to third-party reader tools. Imagery, and especially the subtle interplay of imagery and text, deserve to remain active parts of digital expression. Our goal, whether we’re designers or writers, should be to make this happen. Maybe the Readability team is already thinking through these issues and coming up with new ways to translate content. If so, I’d love to hear about it.

I’ll admit to not having an answer, either. My intent here is to extend the question to you, in the hope that we can figure it out together.

(al) (il)

© Christopher Butler for Smashing Magazine, 2011.