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Thought you might be interested in this article: Websites: Design vs. Style—An Interview With Charles Cooper, The Rockley Group In this exclusive interview with Charles Cooper (Vice President of The Rockley Group), Scott Abel (The Content Wrangler) discusses the difference between design and style, and asks Cooper to help us understand why so much of the content we create is not really useful to end users. TCW: Charles, thanks for taking time to chat with us today. For those of our readers who don’t know who you are or what you do, tell us a little about yourself and the company you work for. CC: I’m Vice President of The Rockley Group. We’re a consultancy that specializes in content, content management and helping people get the information they need. We focus on how people interact with information on a daily basis. We consider what they need, how the information is created, used, reused and how it is presented. And we wrote one of the best selling books on the subject Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy. TCW: We’ve had some great conversations about the future of publishing and the impact that XML and web technologies are having on how we create, manage, and deliver information to those who need it. But, we’re still shocked at how many knowledge workers today - especially writers and other content creators - don’t fully understand the difference between “style” and “design”, two concepts that are central to separating content from its format. So, two questions: what is the difference between ‘style’ and ‘design’, and why does it matter, anyway? CC:Style and design are often used interchangeably, and there is some overlap (as they both affect how things look), but they really are two different things. If you’ve used HTML, it’s easy to remember, as there are ‘style’ tags, , but no similar ‘design’ tags, so that should help. If you haven’t had the joy of dealing with raw HTML, you actually have to remember the difference! So what’s the difference? At its most elemental, style is the surface look; the font choice, color, the amount of white space, while design reflects the underlying decisions used to achieve the best way of getting your point (or information) across. I know that this distinction is not always adhered to and a brief discussion with some visual designers will show this. I’ve been party to this discussion in many businesses and you can see it played out on many boards and forums where layout and design are discussed. There are endless discussions regarding point size, kerning, leading and other typographic requirements, all they while the issue of the underlying design is ignored. It matters because your message is best understood when both style and design work in harmony. When I refer to design in this way, I’m talking about the underlying structure of the page that helps you to navigate the information you see, without being aware of it. I’m talking about the information architecture that defines how the components on the page relate to each other, and how the navigation works. I’m talking about organizing the different types of information so that it makes sense, and so that the information flows from page to page in a logical and efficient manner. I’m talking about designing the website. When I’m talking about style, I’m referring to the ‘look and feel’. Probably the best online example of this can be found on the CSS Zen Garden page. It’s a location dedicated to showing off what Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can do, and how they can separate content from formatting. It also separates design from style. With one click of a button, you can display the same content filtered through different style sheets. The underlying design/structure remains the same, but the style changes radically. It’s important, because if your content is independent from its style you can store and reuse content in different locations and deliver it on different platforms (e.g. computer,

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