1 Less is more

In our cms we have disabled all functions to change typefaces, font-sizes and font-colours. All type is set in the central CSS, our clients understand this and never ask to have the possibility to change the typograpgy.

posted at 11:19 am on June 03, 2008 by Niek Emmen

2 Example?

Great article Jina, Are there any great style design guides that could be used as examples?

posted at 12:40 pm on June 03, 2008 by Garth Braithwaite

3 Example

A good resource, though admittedly needs updated, is our own guidelines which cover accessibility and style and tone – http://acc.nics.gov.uk/

posted at 01:05 pm on June 03, 2008 by Darren Taylor

4 Yes, Example...

Agreed, a good example would really be nice to have along with the article, even if the sensitive info is stripped out.

posted at 01:31 pm on June 03, 2008 by Tom Dell'Aringa

5 Simple Example

Duke Law has a <a href=”http://www.law.duke.edu/edtech/style_guide”>basic style guide</a> for the 20+ non-technical users of their CMS. It has worked well thus far at limiting design disintegration.

posted at 01:48 pm on June 03, 2008 by Scott Lenger

6 McAwesome

Jina, great article and the timing could not be any better! Finding a good reference for style web style guides proved to be pretty difficult. We’re currently in the process of creating a one for our site. I was surprised to see that much of what we decided to include was listed here, so that provided some much needed reassurance.

One additional aspect that we are going to include will be downloadable photoshop templates with the guides in in place. Since we have a few different people creating graphics (full and part-timers) this will help preserve our design grid.

posted at 02:17 pm on June 03, 2008 by Jared Cunha

7 Other considerations

Style guides are an excellent idea. Another consideration should be weather or not Flash, Shockwave, SVG or other alternatives to HTLM are permitted.

Wouldn’t you think by now we’d have design and content tools which would make it easy or automatic to follow these standards. The first thing needed to enable this would be a new version of CSS with variables. (I will never understand how the creators of CSS could have left out so many simple and fundamental capabilities … that they failed to build on the most rudimentary principles used in programming known to any first year student of the practice. And, yes, I am a bit bitter about this. Does that make me a wood nymph?)

posted at 03:31 pm on June 03, 2008 by Robert Shaver

8 Very Applicable

I just started working on team websites and this will be great to communicate what should and should not be on the site. I created a website for one of the departments in our company and we are going to re-design (or re-align) the other departments to mirror this site.

Jared- great tip on PSD templates. Definitely going to make a no-brainer for others who will be making sites.

posted at 03:33 pm on June 03, 2008 by Annie McCance

9 Unrealistic?

I absolutely love the idea of this. We all feel this pain. But when I think about the time involved in creating something like this for clients, it becomes painfully clear that it is unrealistic. Alas.

posted at 03:57 pm on June 03, 2008 by Mark Wyner

10 Charset

Another this to consider is defining the charset used on the site. I’ve run into many problems with users copy/pasting something encoded as UTF-8 (often from Word) into a page that is ISO-8859-1, or vice-versa.

posted at 04:59 pm on June 03, 2008 by Tim Hettler