Portfolio

Design Style Guide and Poster

Organization

The Minnesota Daily

  • Style guide Table of Contents

    The table of contents lists the topics in the document.

    The table of contents lists the topics in the document.

  • How to change the guide

    The introduction describes how to make modifications to the guide.

    The introduction describes how to make modifications to the guide.

  • Opinions section rules

    The Opinions section demonstrates rules about photos, typography, and page layout.

    The Opinions section demonstrates rules about photos, typography, and page layout.

  • Mugshot rules

    The mugshot secion demonstrates layout and typography rules about small photographs and labels within a story.

    The mugshot section demonstrates layout and typography rules about small photographs and labels within a story.

  • 3’ x 5’ Poster

    The poster shows layout and style rules surrounding a large a newspaper from the redesigned Minnesota Daily publication.

    The 3’ x 5’ poster shows layout and style rules surrounding a large a newspaper from the redesigned Minnesota Daily publication.

Summary

After introducing the new Minnesota Daily broadsheet design, I recorded its design in a 35-page guidance document. Built to be easy to use and update, the style guide defines the newspaper's design elements, outlines rules about each element, and shows how they fit together. Each topic fits on one page with rules on the left side and examples on the right side. The style guide allows only one page for each topic so that each page can be removed and updated individually.

The Minnesota Daily is the largest student-run newspaper in the United States and the fourth largest daily newspaper in Minnesota.

The Challenge

The newly designed newspaper was easy to learn and easy to produce, but some of its details were easy to forget. Over time, people forget the original rules and make up something new. This leads to inconsistency and breaks the integrity of the original design. Moreover, many employees at the student-run organization leave after a year or two, so organizational knowledge disappears quickly. New employees needed a reference to learn how the newspaper should be designed. To be successful, this reference needed to be easy to use and easy to update.

The Solution

Preserving the design began with analyzing why these types of guides become unused and outdated and examining examples of successful style guides. Because it would be used and maintained by the production employees, the documentation was authored with their own desktop publishing tools and printed with the laser printer. The guide was bound in a three-ring binder with removable sheets so future employees could revise and reprint pages individually. I reviewed and tested the guide regularly with employees during its design to ensure it was easy to use and easy to change. In addition to the guide, I created a large poster to hang in the production area to emphasize the newspaper's basic design guidelines.

The Results

New employees page through the guide to learn how to lay out the newspaper. Each design department has a copy of the guide, and the production manager keeps them current. The organization recently stopped using Quark for its page layout software and used the guide to recreate the newspaper in Adobe InDesign.

The redesign launched in February 2003 and, with some improvements by the production staff, the newspaper still adheres to the original rules documented in this guide.

Work Completed

  • Style guide analysis
  • Maintenance plans
  • Decisions about major and minor style rules
  • Documentation
  • Usability testing