Content Strategy for Mobile

McGrane articulated what responsive design alone could not solve: that adapting layout to screen size is meaningless if the content itself was never structured for reuse across contexts. The book argued that mobile is not a design problem but an editorial and organisational one — companies fail at mobile because their content is trapped in desktop-shaped blobs with no semantic structure, no metadata, and no separation between meaning and presentation. Published a year after Marcotte's Responsive Web Design, it served as the necessary counterweight: where Marcotte addressed the container, McGrane addressed what goes inside it. The distinction between adaptive presentation and adaptive content remains one of the most underappreciated ideas in product work.