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Draftwerk

Content strategy at Adobe

I worked at Adobe for six years on the Typekit team, initially as the editor for their blog but later as their copywriter and content strategist. Originally a startup that was acquired by Adobe in 2011, Typekit matured (and rebranded!) while I worked on the team, demanding a variety of content skills over those years.

Typekit blog editor

When I started at Typekit, I didn’t know any typographic terminology; I wasn’t even sure about the difference between serif and sans. With the type team I gained experience with taking technical language and making it comprehensible to a general audience — particularly on the blog and in some of our help documentation.

A section of the User Guide for Adobe Fonts, detailing how to use OpenType features in CSS
The Adobe Fonts help documentation gets into some nuanced topics, such as how to use CSS to show fancy typographic features like small caps on a website.

I wrote regular posts on the Typekit blog, running the gamut from promotional announcements to technical product updates.

Farewell Proxima Nova Soft, hello Proxima Soft

Font files are tricky to manage, in part because the people who design them often like to make tweaks or additions. In this post, I explain one of these changes to customers in an effort to mitigate any confusion on their side.

Adobe Captivate, now with fonts from Typekit

An Adobe application called Captivate added the Typekit font library to their product. This was a goodwill post that likely had little overlap with our usual blog audience, but nonetheless endeavored to explain the product offering.

Typekit Help: A quick guide and some updates to our documentation

Typekit maintained its own Help documentation until 2016, when we moved it over to an Adobe-managed central repository. We were concerned that this might confuse some of our original customers, so we explained it a bit in this post.

Website content strategy & copywriting

In 2018, Typekit rebranded itself as Adobe Fonts. This project required an enormous amount of copy revision and rewriting, the most visible of which was on the new product website. I wrote most of the copy that’s on the Adobe Fonts website today.

A brief tagline and three key benefits of the Adobe Fonts product, with a bright background and abstract illustration, to ease into the homepage content
This is the “big picture” overview that appears at the top of the Adobe Fonts homepage.
A brief heading invites users to “Lose Yourself in Letters” with samples of four different typeface families and a “Browse Fonts” call to action.
The copy here needed to be brief but descriptive so that visitors would be quick to begin browsing fonts and using them.
Underneath a heading that reads “How it works”, illustrated panels map the progression from browsing fonts to activating and then using them.
It’s not uncommon for people to be surprised when they learn that there are fonts beyond the ones that come pre-installed as system defaults. We had to describe the font “activation” process as simply as possible.

Content organization & planning

As the team’s content strategist, I designed templates to make our content easier to put together from scratch and more consistent.

A simple text template showing an outline for page content with sample text for each section and estimated range for word or character count.
The font packs still follow this structure.

I took a similar “template” approach to some of our blog posts, many of which presented an opportunity to use a repeatable style to showcase new additions to the font library or new integrations with other Adobe or third-party applications.

A comment on a Trello card details how to write a blog post about any integration with the Typekit library of fonts, listing the questions that any such article needs to answer.
It’s uncanny how simply answering the same handful of questions can result in an infinite number of original blog posts. Having a template also vastly reduced the amount of back-and-forth I needed to do with product managers in order to craft a clear story around a new feature release.

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