Last April, I was skimming my Medium Weekly Digest when I spotted a familiar name: Scott-Ryan Abt. I did a double, maybe even triple-take. I know that guy. I went to high school with him. What’s he doing in my Gmail? And so began a lopsided reunion. After a quick…

An exhibit at The Gardiner Museum, Feb 24-May 15, 2022. Primer on fictocriticism. Strikethrough sentences taken from various Grimms’ Fairy Tales. The Endless Toil of the Puppeteer The eager young puppeteer decided to attend puppet school, as there was no better place for her. She was shy, content to disappear behind a black curtain, letting her…

A small investment in narrative can pay huge dividends (Andy Healey co-authored this post, based on our 2022 Confab talk.) Last summer, Andy Healey and I (Ryan Bigge) came across a Medium article that spoke to our (collective) souls: Slack is no place to write the Great American Novel. As…

Stakeholder: Well, content designer! An excellent effort. You’ve shown us something quite conversational today. Content designer: So then you like it? You really like it? Stakeholder: Of course I do. It’s very good. Of course now and then — just now and then — it seems to have, how shall one say? Too many words. Content designer: I don’t understand. There are just as many words as are required. Neither more nor less.

Inspired by this tweet.

Right content. Wrong order. Confused users. Bad. — Recently, our team was stuck on a tricky mobile screen. We went round and round, talking through the same handful of challenges. But instead of jumping into Miro, or Mural, or FigJam, I dropped this list* into Slack: Page title: reflects primary user task Main task: ensure user can complete…

Marketers spent the last decade trying to turn mundane transactions into emotional joyrides. They failed. — Remember those March 2020 pandemic emails? Probably not. Because every company said the same damn thing: A message to our customers about Covid-19 A message from Namecheap’s CEO A message from AIR MILES regarding Covid-19 Meanwhile, every TV commercial used the same box of magnetic poetry: During these unprecedented times…

In 1999, my friend Jeff Chapman wrote this excerpt for a video game humour book that was never published. Jeff died in August of 2005. I’ve waited a long time to post this and now feels right. “That’s it. That is absolutely it,” Ched Kalinksi announced angrily, ripping the sheet…

How I balance strategy and tactics as a content designer. — For nearly four years, I was a product content strategist. Then, in September 2020, I woke up to discover I was a content designer instead. The title switch didn’t change much — I’ve done tactical stuff as a content strategist and strategic stuff as a content designer. …