Content is at the heart of everything we do working on the web, so it’s not surprising that Content First is as much a rallying cry as Mobile First. Two content-y articles were published last week that make a nice pairing.
Over on the Gather Content blog, Liam King writes about How Content-First Agencies Win Clients.
content-first is about positioning and emphasis on content processes, activities and thinking. It is about demonstrating to prospective clients that you consider content at all points to ensure the project and longer-term success of the site.
Even though clients generally know about Responsive Web Design these days, the wider picture of Mobile First and Content First can still be a bit of a tough sell. One part of Liam’s article is about proving that designing content-first actually works. He suggests pulling a case study into new business presentations to share stories of previous successes with this approach.
Moving on to the more visual side of things, Nathan Ford writes about Content-out Layout at A List Apart.
A ratio-based, modular approach to grids allows us to navigate a medium where we cannot know the container size, nor what type of content will flow into that container. We can build layout systems from our content, and rely on ratios to keep harmonious compositions from these disparate parts.
He provides an excellent introduction to using ratios and scales for your grids, and goes on to highlight some common problems / constraints that cause a layout to look a bit off: 7s, drifts and pinches.
Here are a few more articles and tools on the topic:
- Deriving layout from your typeface on the Typekit blog;
- A More Modern Scale for Web Typography on the Typecast blog;
- Composing the New Canon: Music, Harmony, Proportion from 2011’s edition of 24 ways;
- Tim Brown’s Modular Scale tool.
You might also like to check out my Pinboard bookmarks tagged with typography.