''While reading some of your material published in a Poynter Institute Virtual Seminar in Design/Type/Color, I noticed that you advocated design stylebooks for newsrooms. The news design desk at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is just starting to work to compile such a book and we're looking for examples from other newspapers across the country. Our situation is a bit different from the ones you describe in your web literature, in that we are divided between designers and copy editors (though your example of dummying in one room and editing in another often fits). Though there are fewer hands on the buttons of design, there are still enough, and our design is complex enough, that my supervisors decided a stylebook would be desirable. I thought you might be able to help locate examples of such work and maybe offer tips on how to create a useful book. I'd appreciate any tips you might offer. Thanks for your time.''

Well, Ed, first I recommend that any newsroom larger than two people have at least a basic design stylebook. Especially accompanying a redesign, a stylebook is almost always a good thing. It will reduce questions of style relating to your design and production, for newcomers and old-timers alike and reduce inconsistencies in the paper. A stylebook will also allow your staff to focus on more important issue, like writing better headlines, selecting and cropping better photos, and originating better ideas for illustrations and graphics.
One of the big challenges at the Boston Herald, I thought, when I began this redesign a while back was the lack of a stylebook. Each section of the paper had its own logos and sigs; wildly varying styles had cropped up over the years and the paper looked cluttered. Everyone lamented the lack of a stylebook, so of course the creation of one would come to be a key ingredient to the project.
When it came time to actually produce it, I wrote the ''philosophy'' part of it: What the heck were we trying to accomplish with the redesign, and why? (This information was covered in meetings I held with the staff, and follow-up memos, but we wanted it to have a ''life'' after the project had finished.) How would the two main display font families work together? What is a good amount of white space to aim for on a features page? What is the paper's new policy about manipulating photos?
Linda Kincaid, the Herald's deputy managing editor for design and production, got the hard part. She wrote the part that outlines the coding for the styles - not just for pages produced in the Macintosh, but for pages paginated on Atex and on a proprietary page layout system called Editorial News Layout. So in effect, styles had to be described three ways in the stylebook! This was one more argument to create as few new styles as possible.
As you can imagine, the stylebook - with philosophical essays, descriptions of coding, and numerous visual examples to support each - now approaches 100 pages. Why so long?
''We needed the level of detail in the style guide because we were changing our formats so radically,'' Linda says, ''and also because for a long time, there was no reference available for that level of detail. Example: when I first came to the Herald, no one - NO ONE - could tell me the size and leading of our body type. Nobody really had an answer to the question of how many lines of type there was to the inch. Try learning to copy fit without knowing that!''
The paper's design committee recognized that, while such a thorough document would be beneficial especially at the launch of a dramatic redesign, and later on as a guide for any newcomers to the staff, an editor on deadline would not want to wade through such a thick document. So an at-a-glance section is being created to summarize, on just a few pages, the key styles used in the new look of the paper (scheduled to go public in late summer '98).
This is not a project to be done overnight. All told, the creation of the Herald stylebook will take at least an estimated six weeks, but over the course of a year, not in one solid chunk of time. For example, sections on how the various elements will be coded involve a lot of back-and-forth communication with the technical services staff and simultaneous adjustments of prototypes and templates.
I'm not convinced you should approach the creation of a stylebook any differently just because a large portion of your design work is done on the desk, rather than in an art department. It might mean that, like Boston, you have to do a little more writing to chronicle the different styles used by news layout systems rather than Quark.
Ultimately, both artists and editors laying out your pages will benefit from your styles being written in stone. This will take out the guesswork and discourage designers from fiddling with elements that should not be arbitrary, and help refocus attention on the art direction, design direction, and photo direction for the live news and features of the day.

QUICK TIPS FOR CREATING A STYLEBOOK
© By Ron Reason

Following is some advice for creating a new stylebook:
1) Indexing for the stylebook is important: allowing users to find what they need instantly. Create a page up front that tells what this document is, where to find things, how to use it, and how it will be maintained through the years.
2) Create a system by which pages can be revised and inserted into the stylebook as your design evolves. Of course, this suggests that the book be produced in an adjustable format such as a three-ring binder. When a new design edict comes down, copies of the revised or new page can be distributed to all, for replacement or addition to the stylebook.
3) Make sure everyone knows who is the keeper of the stylebook. Will it be a managing editor for visuals, the art director, or the head of the design committee? Otherwise, the above point is almost moot, and your design will start to dissolve soon after implementing a redesign.
4) It's a good idea to have a color palette in your stylebook. This is a record of the colors you have selected for your newspaper, the combinations of CMYK or spot ink required to produce them, and preferably, actual print samples of the colors. These would duplicate your color menu in QuarkXpress templates as well. Show colors in small swatches with black type printed over the light colors, and white type reversed out of dark colors, to show how type and color will interact on your presses.
5) It's also a good idea to have a graphics component of your stylebook. This would show what the type fonts and sizes are for infographics headlines, chatter, pointer boxes, etc. It might also describe how a graphic gets done at your paper, and might include a copy of your graphics request form.
6) At the Boston Herald, the statement of the paper's new photo ethics policy will be included in the design stylebook. You might also like to print a copy of your paper's current photo request form as well. Says Linda Kincaid: ''We're also planning to add an appendix with info on production procedures; basically an indexed compendium of all the memos I've had to write over the last year on everything from naming conventions to page setups for printing Mac pages.''
7) As your staff gets used to its redesign, or even to its new stylebook, your page designs will become more refined. Designate someone to collect excellent pages - even one or two a month - and photocopy them to 8 1/2 x 11 pages to inserted into the stylebook. This will serve to inspire the staff in later months and years.
One key function of a good stylebook is to chronicle the institutional history of the paper. If your stylebook isn't touched for 10 years, it's going to seem like a museum piece. And by that point, maybe your newspaper will, too!

© Ron Reason. Not to be republished without permission or recirculated without attribution.

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