Still human: reflections from a Content Design Meetup
A few weeks ago I went to a meetup about the career progression of content designers called: London Content Design Meetup - Let’s Talk About Career Progression. I came away feeling reassured and inspired to keep going on my content design journey.
What made the evening so interesting was hearing how different everyone’s journeys had been. It made me reflect on my own path too, which has been anything but linear.
I started out as a copywriter for a furniture website, writing about mattresses (you’d be surprised how much you can write about a mattress), then moved into a software company where I worked on app development guidelines. Part of that role involved interviewing designers to understand how the apps worked and how teams approached the design process.
Looking back now, I can see how much of that work was already rooted in content design thinking, even before I properly called it that or even knew it existed as a profession.
Then I stumbled on a role at the Government Digital Service (GDS) as a content designer and I thought: this is it. This is what I’ve been looking for in my next role.
I wanted work that genuinely made a difference to people’s lives. I wanted to create content that everyone might need to use at some point — content that helped people navigate government services and access important information. That’s probably where my real passion for content design grew.
That was probably the biggest takeaway from the meetup: there isn’t one “correct” route into content design. Everyone brings something different into the role, and that variety is what makes the discipline stronger.
AI and the future of content design
Another topic that came up a lot was AI, which feels unavoidable at the moment. But interestingly, the conversation kept circling back to the one thing that AI cannot do: be human.
Good content design isn’t just about words on a page. It’s about understanding people. From the users reading the content to the teams creating the service, and the organisations trying to make something work. Content has to connect all of those things together.
And while AI can generate words, it can’t truly understand the nuance of people, relationships, frustrations, or trust in the way humans can. That felt reassuring.
I’m actually going on a two-day Content Design London’s course called Working with GenAI next week. It focuses on learning to use Generative AI (GenAI) tools effectively in your content work, and I’m genuinely excited about it! I’ll definitely post about how it goes afterwards.
I do feel like I have to start leaning into this new world of AI. I think it can really help automate certain tasks, like content audits, and free up my time to focus on the bigger picture. That’s where we could take content design to new heights, because we’d have space and time to think more strategically on things like culture change in an organisation.
There are exciting things happening in the land of Drupal to help content designers. For example:
AI content audit tool from Digital Journey Coach – David Bishop gave us a demo of it a few weeks back and I think it’s going to massively speed up parts of the auditing process
Showing the value of what you’re doing
One point from the evening really stayed with me: we probably need to spend less time explaining what content design is, and more time showing the value it brings. This is something I have found during my career and I couldn’t agree more.
Sometimes content design can feel difficult to define in abstract terms. But when you show someone a confusing webpage that’s been simplified, or a static PDF transformed into an interactive directory, the value becomes obvious immediately. You don’t need a long explanation or industry jargon around it. It just works better. And maybe that’s enough.
The meetup reminded me that despite all the conversations around automation and AI, there’s still huge value in human judgement, empathy, and curiosity. And as tangled as my own career path has been at times, it also reminded me that there’s no single way to become a content designer. We’re all bringing our own experiences into the work and that actually helps content design grow.
Human perspective still matters (and hopefully always will).
