Style guides, dataviz style guides, and templates, oh my!

In this video, you’ll learn about the differences between each one, and see some quick examples, too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npGR0ND8Vf4

What’s Inside

0:00 Welcome

0:28 Ann’s Diagram re: Your Branding Resources

0:47 Variations by Company/Organization

1:27 Style Guides: What’s Typically Inside

2:07 Dataviz Style Guides: What’s Typically Inside

2:34 Templates for Slidedecks, Reports, and More

2:59 Branding Resources – Designed for YOU

3:16 What Do You Want to Learn More About?

3:31 Don’t Forget to Like, Subscribe, and Share

Transcript

Style guides, dataviz style guides, templates. That is a lot of jargon. In this video, I’m going to break it down for you. I’m going to tell you what’s what, what should ideally go inside each of these. Hi, I’m Ann Emery. Welcome back to Dataviz On The Go, the series where I make jet speed tutorials for you as I’m racing around between workshops.

And speaking of workshops, I gave a half day workshop just last week about dataviz style guides. And one of the things we covered was this diagram, which you know me, it’s made in good old Excel of all places. And I made it to show how all of these things fit together. Okay. So here is the universe, right,

of all of your branding resources that you would ideally have at your workplace. In practice, not every group has all of these. Some of them have really basic guides and templates. Some of them have really elite, really advanced guides and templates. I have seen a little bit of everything. I see about 50 to a [00:01:00] hundred style guides and dataviz style guides every year as part of my private workshop process.

So during the prep, I’ll say, “Send me your this, and send me your that, and send me your style guide and or dataviz style guide in whatever format it’s in. If it’s, you know, beginner, if it’s advanced, just show me what you’ve got and we’ll take it to the next level.” So here’s what I typically see, right.

It’s like a little bit of a few of these things. So out of all of your branding resources, you would ideally have your organization’s style guide. Now, what typically goes in inside there, it’s going to be logo guidance, your colors, your fonts. You might have some photos. You might have some writing tips.

Like, do you capitalize the F in federal government or not? Do you spell out numbers at the beginning of a sentence or not? It might have writing tips like that. It’s going to live in usually a PDF. It might be short. It might be long, depending on how big your organization is, or it might live [00:02:00] online. I see that a lot with universities.

They’ll have a few pages on their website with all of their branding resources, very public facing. Within there, ideally, if you’re a data organization, if you make graphs for any part of your work, you would ideally have a dataviz style guide with sample charts and maps and tables. And, um, And, fingers crossed, in a perfect world, you’d have data specific tips.

“We use color in this way to make sure it’s accessible. We pay attention to color contrast this way. Here’s what we do for binary, sequential, diverging variables,” and so on. Templates are a little bit different. Okay. If you make a lot of presentations, you’re going to need a slide deck template. If you make a lot of reports, you’re going to need a report template.

You’re going to need all the templates. They might live inside Excel, PowerPoint, Canva, Power BI, Tableau. They’re going to live inside that software program. It’s not just a PDF with screenshots. It should be an actual editable template that staff can type in because, after all, all of these [00:03:00] branding resources are designed for you to save you time and help you look professional so that staff aren’t just like creating everything from scratch all the time.

That would be really, uh, really messy. That would be really time consuming, right? Who wants to waste time like that? Alright, you tell me, comment below the video, what would you like to learn more about? Do you want to see sample style guides, sample dataviz style guides? I’ve got templates and rubrics for all of these things to help you take your resources to the next level.

Happy to share, happy to help.

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