Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it's decoration. - Jeffrey Zeldman

We've all heard that content is king, yet when it comes to designing web experiences we're still stuck with lorem ipsum and placeholder images, as though the real content didn't matter.

We're still designing web experiences from the top down, starting with the desktop view of the homepage, even though they're more likely to be experienced from the bottom up - starting with a content detail page on a mobile device.

Designing from the content out means starting with atomic elements of content, and building a system of components and layouts based on the real structure of content.