You’re working with a content strategist on a web design project. What do you need to know to ensure success?

1 Understand the content strategy

Before you start designing, you need to understand the content strategy of the website. This means reading the content brief, the content audit, the user personas, the user journeys, the content types, the content models, and the editorial guidelines. These documents will help you to align your design decisions with the content goals, needs, and preferences of the target audience. They will also help you to avoid creating design elements that are inconsistent, redundant, or irrelevant to the content.

2 Communicate regularly

Communication is key to any successful collaboration, especially between web designers and content strategists. You need to communicate regularly throughout the project, from the initial brainstorming to the final testing and launch. You need to share your ideas, feedback, questions, and concerns with each other, and use tools like wireframes, mockups, prototypes, and style guides to illustrate your design concepts and content requirements. You also need to be open to constructive criticism, compromise, and iteration, and respect each other's expertise and perspective.

3 Design for content

One of the main challenges of web design is to balance form and function, aesthetics and usability, creativity and clarity. To achieve this balance, you need to design for content, not around it. This means that you need to consider the content as an integral part of your design, not as an afterthought or a filler. You need to use design principles like hierarchy, contrast, alignment, proximity, and white space to highlight the most important and relevant content, and to guide the users through the website. You also need to use design elements like typography, color, imagery, icons, and animations to support and enhance the content, and to create a consistent and engaging visual identity.

4 Optimize for performance

Another important aspect of web design is to optimize for performance, especially in terms of speed, accessibility, and responsiveness. These factors affect not only the user experience, but also the content delivery and consumption. You need to work with a content strategist to ensure that your design does not compromise the performance of the website, and that it adapts to different devices, browsers, and screen sizes. You need to use techniques like compression, minification, caching, lazy loading, and media queries to reduce the load time and bandwidth of your design assets, and to make them responsive and accessible to all users.