Designing for Content

With David Hickox in the Designer track

In this talk, I’ll go over the method I’ve created for designing websites from the content outward. I’ll cover aspects of designing in code, type choices, line height and typographic scale, creating a proper base style sheet for your child theme, usability best practices, semantic structure, and more. Since the web is fundamentally a text-based, utilitarian medium, making good type choices is arguably the most important aspect of web design. In this presentation, I’ll walk you through the things I’ve learned in my 15 years designing for the web.

The intended audience is designers who use WordPress as their CMS, but it has css and code elements that should resonate with front end developers as well as general typographic and structural principles that are helpful for content creators.

Learning outcomes

  • apply time-tested principles of typography and layout to the web
  • build out a base “kitchen sink” typography stylesheet
  • make better font choices in their designs
  • gain an appreciation for content-focused design