As a designer and now a developer I´ve been noticing a shift in my way of approaching design. As a graphic designer my goal is to communicate trough a visual format but as a developer I think the clever way of design is presenting the users with a minimalistic canvas where they can interact with a clutter-free content. Don´t get me wrong, I still love deep textured design with a lot of splatters and shadows and all the stuff you can imagine, but I do think when you are facing UX Design the goal here is the content, content is THE KING, so you have to be like silence in music, subtle and encompassing.

Just wondering — why did you not think content was king when you did graphic design? I've always believed that the purpose of any graphic design was to communicate the information. Anything that didn't fulfill that goal was not graphic design but illustration/art/a failed design.

Hi Julius, good point. When I'm doing graphic design, specially with visuals, it depends, but I tend to think about the visual to be the content itself, It's like you are telling a story and you use as many styles as needed to get to the goal. But on UX Design the goal is the contet, so you have to take as many things that could get in the way of interacting with the content, take this site for example, the goal here is for users to interact with conversations.

"you have to take as many things that could get in the way of interacting with the content"

Absolutely agreed.

How this principle can be applied to apps that are functional heavy or where the content is "built" dynamically (ex: point of sale/shopping cart application where the interaction starts with a functional-heavy view and "content" is added as the transaction evolves)? In other words, is there a novel way to design these kinds of apps based on the "content first" principle? Another example is Windows 8: metro UI design principles are based on content first, but the Start page is a grid of buttons (albeit "live"). Is there another way to approach this?