I want very badly to blame it on our name. Content strategist. It’s bitter on the tongue. It sticks to the roof of your mouth. It’s opaque and inelegant, like UX designer or information architect.

It’s easy to find fault with our inscrutable moniker, which unapologetically defies its own golden rule: Speak plainly, dammit.

But I don’t think our name is the problem. Our work is the problem. It’s kaleidoscopic, varied and changing rapidly— alongside the web and the publishing industry. Our work, I imagine, is simply not yet specialized or old enough to enjoy a little black dress of a name like designer.

Might as well forget about the little black dress, then. At least for now. Might as well get comfortable with our patchwork pants, which I’ll try to define here.

Content strategists are kind of like:

A boss

Know how CEOs and COOs look at their companies from way high up and think of ways they can be more profitable in the future? How this may mean changing their offerings, how they bundle products, what they emphasize, how they operate or who they hire?

Some content strategists are like this too, but with a focus on content. They can take a look at your content, decide what’s not working for your business, come up with a plan for what might work better, and help you see that plan through. They may suggest that you hire people or use different technology to help this process along.

A managing editor

Know how managing editors at magazines help decide what will go in the magazine, which content will be featured, how it should be written and ordered, who will write it, etc.? How doing this requires a curatorial sense, a great style guide, an editorial calendar, and incredibly well honed editing and proofreading skills?

Some content strategists are like this. Except pretend the magazine is a web app, website, blog or whatever else.

A designer

Know how designers get to know your business and goals, work with art directors to come up with concepts, create wireframes and mocks and prototypes, then iterate a bunch until they’ve got something good?

Content strategists are like this. They create content concepts (messaging and hierarchies), content mocks (wireframes, decks, Word docs, etc) and interactive flows (content as the user experiences it while traversing your website or app). All based on your goals.

A copywriter

Know how copywriters drink Manhattans and smoke cigarettes and come up with 800 newfangly billboard slogans, only two of which will ever make it to press?

Content strategists are like this, except sometimes the billboard slogans are bits of microcopy, error messages and landing pages.

A therapist

Know how therapists talk you out of making self-destructive decisions and help you get in touch with your authentic purpose? Sometimes content strategists do this, too.

A developer and engineer

Know how developers and engineers create systems to help structure and deliver design and content? Technical content strategists do this too. (Note: Tiffani is not an expert at this kind of content strategy, and can probably not do it justice in one metaphor.)

And more

I’m sure I’ve failed to refract some part of what we do. Let me know if I’ve missed a spot.

Image credit: http://butdoesitfloat.com/Mysterious-patterns-reveal-true-nature-of-reality

Today I’ve broken my chatting fast in an interview I did with smartypants editor and content generalist Erin Kissane over at Contents Magazine. The interview is about the nitty gritty of doing content strategy at Facebook—the quirks, challenging bits and how my team operates overall. If you’re curious about how we decide on words like “Like” or just want a glimpse of what it’s like to work at Facebook, you should check it out.

Here’s the whole thing.

While you’re at it, you should check out the rest of Contents, too. You’ll find fantasmic writing by Brain Traffic’s Melissa Rach, the always-classy Mandy Brown and more.

Finally, I owe a big shout out to my team of power people at Facebook. Alicia Dougherty-Wold, Sarah Marx Cancilla, Evany Thomas and Amy Thibodeau: you’re the cat’s pajamas!

Trying not to go all Tupac-Biggie on this, but it’s great to see NYC and SF growing such exciting design communities.

Huge thanks and congrats to @FictiveCameron and @shiflett to putting on the event.

See you there.

I’ll post a more thoughtful run-down of how it all came together later, but here’s the TL:DR recap.

A fitted shirt

Our old, dark brown design served us well, but it didn’t fully reflect our services, personality or style. It was a lovely old shirt that fit a little too loose, if you will.

To tighten things up, we worked with the super-talented Edrea Lita, who helped us create a new visual identity, including our logo and design direction. (More on this soon—but in short, hire Edrea!)

As for the new web design and build, that’s courtesy of yours truly. And Tiff rethought and rewrote all our content, editing wildly for effect. The result is a cleaner, lighter Things That Are Brown that represents us much better.

A new course

Though our initial strategy was to get great clients and keep them coming back with this site, our move to Facebook has meant that suddenly, we don’t need to book more projects.

To address this shift, we had to yank a lot of our creative work from this design. Painful, but it just wasn’t relevant anymore. The current design has a few rough edges to sand because of all this re-jiggering.

Next steps

I’ll be tweaking the wonkier bits of the site over the next few months. Meanwhile, it’s good to be back and writing again. Tiff and I hope to see you here soon.

To say we’re “excited about the opportunity” wouldn’t do the feeling justice—we’re pumped. Amped.

In the Company of Others

Facebook has some extremely talented people working for them, and more collaboration is something I’ve been craving since I started working as a professional designer. Every time I work in the company of other smart minds, the quality of my work grows immeasurably.

Of course, the decision to leave our companies is bittersweet. We’ve been fortunate to have outstanding clients, many of whom we’ve become close friends with. We’ve also grown tremendously as a result of being entrepreneurs, and take pride in the work we’ve done. It’s been a satisfying ride.

Onwards

We can’t think of a better time to be at Facebook. We’ve been hankering for more professional interaction. And of course, the work we do there will have a far-reaching impact.

So without further adieu, please join us in a celebratory forearm bash (thank you). Also, if you’re going to be at SXSW 2011, come see us—we’ll both be there with Facebook. You can catch Tiff with the Content Strategy team at Confab 2011 in Minneapolis. Or, you could let us know if you’re in the SF bay area, where we’re moving in just a week.

And finally: The Brown Blog has gone dark while we’ve planned our switch to Facebook, but we’ll pick up where we left off after we move. We won’t be taking on any new client work, but we’ll be back blogging about design & content-related topics shortly.

Here’s the short version: buy one. If you’re in the market for a professional laptop, you really shouldn’t look at much else but the new MacBook Air.

Very fast.

It’s a welcome change of pace to work 8 hours straight with Photoshop and Illustrator and not see an angry beachball. Big apps launch in just a second or two, and files snap open when called. More interesting though, is the Air’s pervasive speed. Popping up font menus, new tabs, dialog boxes, scrolling through photos, loading big Word documents—whatever you want, it just happens. It makes the overall experience of using your computer a lot less stressful.

The speed, of course, comes from the built-in SSD harddrive. Others have explained why this is important, so I won’t digress. Really, it doesn’t matter why it’s happening, just know that nearly everything is faster because of it. If you don’t need a new laptop, look into upgrading to an SSD.

Nice to look at.

The Air is a sexy little beast. It’s light enough to make traveling almost completely painless (aside from the recurring feeling you’ve left it behind). The screen has superb color, and the high-resolution panel gives you just enough ‘room’ to work on the road. It also powers the 27″ Cinema Display flawlessly—it’s what I plug into at work. It feels just about as solid as an iPad in terms of build.

It’s all the little details, adding up one by one, that make it a great machine. You can read the spec sheet as many times as you want and not understand what you’re missing. If you need a new laptop, I strongly recommend the MacBook Air 13″ (with the 4GB of RAM upgrade). Shoot me an email if you have any questions.