Brand consistency is key to gaining a competitive edge, loyalty and credibility in higher ed. But this is often difficult to achieve with content, particularly across multiple channels and formats with lots of contributors.
That’s why having an in-house style guide for your university can help. But what goes into the perfect content style guide? What should you avoid? How do you make sure your style guide gets used?
When searching online, I came across plenty of style guides that were lengthy, dry documents with walls of text, big A-Zs and nothing else, or 120-page bullet-point lists that seem to never end.
Style guides have a lot of elements to them - you have to think about writing style, tone of voice, design, logos etc. But people are not going to read the type of style guide I mentioned above, let alone stick to it!
In this article, I'll briefly deconstruct some examples of useful, usable style guides in higher education. You can use these for inspiration to create or improve an existing style guide.
There’s such a strong sense of branding and personality, even from a first glance. They are all very visual, bold, eye-catching guidelines of no more than 20 pages that read almost like a presentation slide deck.
Many style guides may have their 'big idea' buried somewhere in the document. But this is quite striking. What's nice is they really go into detail about the background of the brand, to give context to writing style and design. If you give people a reason to get excited about your brand in your style guide, they are more likely to follow it.
It's clear a lot of effort has gone into making these visually appealing, and it pays off. There’s a great use of bold headings to break the text up, lots of colour, quotes from famous writers to motivate people, examples, icons and active verbs. The design makes them easy to digest and helps people skim through initially, then get to the part they need.
2. University of Georgia
The University of Georgia has a brand style guide that knows what it wants to say, and how it wants to say it. It has a great front page that is simple, and easy to navigate for different teams.
They use tables, layout and structure to show information clearly.
In their writing style guide, for example, they’ve got a general guidelines summary which is easy-to-read with pithy statements to help writers. A good style guide finds and sticks to a common language, and knows its audience in order to help writers know their audience.
There can be a lot to include in a style guide, so it's easy for information to get lost and disordered. Not for Oxford. This contents page is one-page, wide, with links to each section, and there’s an introduction talking about values and objectives. This is an excellent example of easing people into a potentially dense and difficult document.
What I like about this style guide is they’ve included green and red icons for “do’s and don’ts”. This is great because often with house style, there’s a fine line between what is on-brand and what isn’t, and it’s sometimes difficult to know where this line is without specific examples.
4. University of Dundee
What’s great about this style guide is it’s online. Having your style guide on your website or in an active document means that can be edited, contributed to and updated easily to reflect your brand as it grows.
A sign of a well-written style guide is that you’ve communicated all the key points succinctly, with minimal fuss. The University of Dundee understands this. Their style guide is responsive, simple and has a clean design. And, most of their style guide sections are kept to less-than-a-page long:
At first you begin to wonder how they’ve crammed everything in. But, what is unique and genuinely useful about Dundee’s style guide is their Searchable Reference Manual. This search bar allows writers to find things such as ‘date format’ or ‘abbreviations.’ Meaning the nitty-gritty bits of a style guide that are usually buried halfway down a huge document are now easy to access.
GatherContent has also written an article in our Anatomy of a Content Style Guide series on the University of Dundee, which looks at their style guide in-depth, and how they created it.
How GatherContent can help you implement your style guide
GatherContent is a content operations platform that helps universities and colleges plan, create and manage content at scale. You can embed your style guide and content templates into the editing environment. This means people can stick to your style easily, and you’ll have consistent, high-quality content that is on-brand and meets audience needs.
Brand consistency is key to gaining a competitive edge, loyalty and credibility in higher ed. But this is often difficult to achieve with content, particularly across multiple channels and formats with lots of contributors.
That’s why having an in-house style guide for your university can help. But what goes into the perfect content style guide? What should you avoid? How do you make sure your style guide gets used?
When searching online, I came across plenty of style guides that were lengthy, dry documents with walls of text, big A-Zs and nothing else, or 120-page bullet-point lists that seem to never end.
Style guides have a lot of elements to them - you have to think about writing style, tone of voice, design, logos etc. But people are not going to read the type of style guide I mentioned above, let alone stick to it!
In this article, I'll briefly deconstruct some examples of useful, usable style guides in higher education. You can use these for inspiration to create or improve an existing style guide.
There’s such a strong sense of branding and personality, even from a first glance. They are all very visual, bold, eye-catching guidelines of no more than 20 pages that read almost like a presentation slide deck.
Many style guides may have their 'big idea' buried somewhere in the document. But this is quite striking. What's nice is they really go into detail about the background of the brand, to give context to writing style and design. If you give people a reason to get excited about your brand in your style guide, they are more likely to follow it.
It's clear a lot of effort has gone into making these visually appealing, and it pays off. There’s a great use of bold headings to break the text up, lots of colour, quotes from famous writers to motivate people, examples, icons and active verbs. The design makes them easy to digest and helps people skim through initially, then get to the part they need.
2. University of Georgia
The University of Georgia has a brand style guide that knows what it wants to say, and how it wants to say it. It has a great front page that is simple, and easy to navigate for different teams.
They use tables, layout and structure to show information clearly.
In their writing style guide, for example, they’ve got a general guidelines summary which is easy-to-read with pithy statements to help writers. A good style guide finds and sticks to a common language, and knows its audience in order to help writers know their audience.
There can be a lot to include in a style guide, so it's easy for information to get lost and disordered. Not for Oxford. This contents page is one-page, wide, with links to each section, and there’s an introduction talking about values and objectives. This is an excellent example of easing people into a potentially dense and difficult document.
What I like about this style guide is they’ve included green and red icons for “do’s and don’ts”. This is great because often with house style, there’s a fine line between what is on-brand and what isn’t, and it’s sometimes difficult to know where this line is without specific examples.
4. University of Dundee
What’s great about this style guide is it’s online. Having your style guide on your website or in an active document means that can be edited, contributed to and updated easily to reflect your brand as it grows.
A sign of a well-written style guide is that you’ve communicated all the key points succinctly, with minimal fuss. The University of Dundee understands this. Their style guide is responsive, simple and has a clean design. And, most of their style guide sections are kept to less-than-a-page long:
At first you begin to wonder how they’ve crammed everything in. But, what is unique and genuinely useful about Dundee’s style guide is their Searchable Reference Manual. This search bar allows writers to find things such as ‘date format’ or ‘abbreviations.’ Meaning the nitty-gritty bits of a style guide that are usually buried halfway down a huge document are now easy to access.
GatherContent has also written an article in our Anatomy of a Content Style Guide series on the University of Dundee, which looks at their style guide in-depth, and how they created it.
How GatherContent can help you implement your style guide
GatherContent is a content operations platform that helps universities and colleges plan, create and manage content at scale. You can embed your style guide and content templates into the editing environment. This means people can stick to your style easily, and you’ll have consistent, high-quality content that is on-brand and meets audience needs.
Paige is an English Literature and Media graduate from Newcastle University, and over the last three years has built up a career in SEO-driven copywriting for tech companies. She has written for Microsoft, Symantec and LinkedIn, as well as other SaaS companies and IT consulting firms. With an audience-focused approach to content, Paige handles the lifecycle from creation through to measurement, supporting businesses with their content operations.
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