Make your own style guide
This guide is written to be copied. Most of it applies to any organisation as it is: the principles, chart limits, map rules and the brief. A few parts depend on your brand and tools. This page lists those parts and how to approach each one.
The source is on GitHub. Fork it, or take the structure and write your own.
What to keep and what to change
| Part | Keep as is | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Principles | ✔ | |
| Planning | ✔ | Swap the examples for your own domain, and rename the requester and maker roles to match your team. |
| Colour | The rules | The palette itself. See Build your own palette. |
| Typography | The criteria | The typeface, chosen to fit your brand and tools. |
| Chart layout | The element list | The positions, logo rules and template files. |
| Chart types and limits | ✔ | Tighten the limits if your audience is mostly 3-second readers. |
| Map layout | The element rules | The paper sizes, basemap choice and logo variants. |
| Dashboards | The layout and rules | The status colours, and a template in your BI tool. |
| Background | ✔ |
Order of work
- Build the data palette: start from Okabe–Ito, shift it towards your brand, fix an order, derive ramps and test. This is the biggest job and affects everything else. See Build your own palette.
- Check your brand font against the number criteria. If it fails, pick a chart typeface that matches its character.
- Decide the colour roles: which brand colour is used for titles, which grey for gridlines, and which for de-emphasised data. One table, like the one in Colour.
- Build chart and map templates in the tools your team actually uses: Excel or PowerPoint chart templates, a ggplot or matplotlib theme, a Datawrapper theme, a GIS layout. A guide without templates gets ignored.
- Make one good example of each common chart type with your own data. Examples convince people more than rules do.
- Publish the brief, so requests arrive with a message, an audience and data.
Make the rules stick
- Keep the core short. People read the rules but skip the theory, which is why this guide keeps the research on separate pages.
- Say why. A rule with a one-line reason is followed. A rule without one gets argued about.
- Make the right choice the default. If your template has no chart border, nobody has to remember the “no borders” rule.
- Review against the principles and the checklist, not against taste.