In the past I’ve writ­ten and lec­tured about the idea that we’re leav­ing an era where design oper­ates in the nar­ra­tive mode, in which its fun­da­men­tal pur­pose is to cre­ate canon­i­cal, highly con­trolled visual sto­ries. We’re now in an era — the dig­i­tal era — where the new par­a­digm is design­ing for behav­ior: cre­at­ing state­ful sys­tems that are respon­sive to user inputs and envi­ron­men­tal inputs, where pre­sen­ta­tion is not just sep­a­rated from con­tent, but where pre­sen­ta­tion is volatile and con­tin­u­ally chang­ing by nature.

These two modes of think­ing are so dif­fer­ent and even so in con­flict with one another that to find a nexus between them is very dif­fi­cult. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “The test of a first-rate intel­li­gence is the abil­ity to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the abil­ity to func­tion,” and that, more or less, is what’s required to be a great edi­to­r­ial expe­ri­ence designer. You must under­stand users and their expec­ta­tions, and you must also under­stand authors and their expec­ta­tions, and some­how, by hook or by crook, you must rec­on­cile these wildly diver­gent world­views into a sin­gle, coher­ent whole that looks and feels effortless.