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Style guides and SRCCON

28 Jul 2014

I just got back from SRCCON, and it was amazing. SRCCON was the first of it’s kind — bringing together developers, designers, and other technologists who work in (or around) newsrooms. I was able to go because of a generous travel stipend provided by SRCCON via Wordpress.

Inspired by the Source community, which is run by Open News, a project of Mozilla and the Knight Foundation, SRCCON was an extremely valuable, well-run, and detailed event. Everything was focused around getting to know each other and community building including discussion-focused sessions, coffee-hacking stations, plenty of mingle time, late starts to allow folks to stay up late, and evening activities such as lightning talks, beer swaps, and Magic. All this while having meaningful sessions and discussions about the exciting intersection of journalism and technology.

Style guides

As part of the conference, I led a short discussion on “Style guides”. This topic came up because we recently made a first draft of a style guide for our interactive team at MinnPost. Full notes and links are up on Github.

My assumption going in was that “style guide” meant a collection of design and functionality for a web interface; so essentially I was just thinking about HTML/CSS/JS. After doing some research, I realized I had totally forgot about the obvious news style guide, the AP Stylebook — what most people would think of if I said “style guide” in a newsroom. This made me dig a bit deeper and start to broaden what I was thinking about, and I came up with quite a big list of style guides for all types of things. So, our first step in our discussion was to quickly list out things that could be stylized; here’s what we came up with:

  • Web interfaces
  • Copy and grammar
  • Tone
  • Visualizations
  • Project management
  • Devops best practices. Example: TwelveSteps
  • Code (syntax)
  • Internal communication
    • Tools to use
    • Tone
    • Ensure email has a subject
  • External communication, tone
  • General computer use
    • File sharing
    • Password management
  • Code of Conduct
  • Design
    • Typography
    • Colors
  • Photography
    • Processing
    • Resizing
  • Advertising
  • Interaction patterns
  • Web interface
  • Copy, grammar

Strength and weakness

The next activity was to break up into groups and brainstorm about what were the pros and cons (strengths and weaknesses) of the style guide. I wanted to list these out to help get an idea of why an organization would or wouldn’t make a style guide. Here’s the notes of what we all came up with.

Pros:

  • Helps with onboarding new employees or contributors to project.
  • Less debate about stylistic things
  • Generally saves time
  • Provides an essential, referencable source
  • Forces decision making
  • Can require thinking about accessibility or other things that may be often overlooked.
  • Helps maintain control and scope on projects
  • Makes things that don’t follow require and show importance. Shining breakthroughs.
  • Don’t have to start from scratch
  • Suppresses whims of superiors
  • Requires specific understanding of why there is a need to break or go outside the style guide.
  • Offers a good amount flexibility. “guide” not “rules”.
  • Offers ownership
    • Will be used by team that creates it
  • Solidifies branding and identity
  • Saves time building.
  • Makes communication smoother.
  • Provides consistency.
  • Easier to maintain whatever the style guide is for.
  • Can provide for an early testbed.

Cons:

  • Requires time, commitment, and execution
  • Requires maintenance
  • Requires buy-in and use
  • Might have to defend (often) against haters.
  • Could provide a false send of security
    • Ex. just because an app passes Apple’s guidelines, doesn’t make it useful or important.
  • Can stifle innovation or creativity
  • Requires adjustment period to use
  • Balancing comprehesiveness and flexibility
  • Can become stale
  • Not always shared across organization
    • Ex. Print department may have their own style guide, while the web department does too
  • How to reconcile web and print style guides
  • Overall investment
  • Can become too authoritative, or “gospel-like”
  • Misuse of the style guide
  • Not having ownership can mean not using
    • If team uses old team’s style guide
  • Can be a significant barrier to entry, specifically to contributing to a (open source) project.
  • Can be very negative if style guide goes against larger, universal styles
  • May limit creativity
  • Requires expertise

Is there common ground?

For the last few minutes we talked about whether there is any opportunity for the community of technologists and journalists to make community-wide style guides; the AP Stylebook being a good example as it is used across many new organizations. Also, the ProPublica News Nerds guide is an interesting example that is specific journalism but not to one newsroom.

This was a tough one to answer and definitely one we couldn’t get too far in just a few minutes. But here are a few general thoughts we came up with.

  • There are definitely things that don’t have or require a specific journalism context such as coding style guides. Overall, there is no reason to write Javascript in a way that is specific to journalism.
  • The AP Stylebook is somewhat unique in that AP content is so widely distribution to so many organizations.
  • Design related guides are usually very tied to an organization and specifically its identity and branding which makes it difficult to allow it to be useful across organizations.
  • There was also interest expressed about guides on how to do things specifically in a journalism context.
    • (Open source) tools for data processing and other journalism activitis.
    • How to write a README for other journalists.
    • How to release open source software.
    • Best way to evaluate tools.