Style Guide
Purpose: Create a Style Guide for Social Media Posts
Tools: MS Office Suite/Google Docs/Adobe Acrobat
For: Content Strategy and Management (TCID 3130)
Create Standardization Methods
Standardization methods are a way of ensuring that content has uniform rules for language, formatting, and structure. Standardization can be used to apply consistent tones, terms, and headings across several mediums. A style guide is one way to ensure good standardization. This style guide was created to manage content across platforms on social media, multimedia platforms, and a website.
Context
This style guide is part of a larger project to create content strategy for a local nonprofit. The nonprofit I selected for this project was The Old Mutt Hut. The Old Mutt Hut (TOMH) exists to provide senior dogs comfort and care at a serene ranch located just outside Colorado Springs. Prior to this project, TOMH's social media presence was mostly limited to a Facebook page and a website that had not been updated in years. Additional deliverables for this assignment included an Audience Analysis and Persona and a final Content Strategy Plan. The style guide was the culminating effort of this assignment.
Analysis
This project began using Google Docs. I did not have any
experience working with Google Docs, so a lot of the initial work
consisted of me learning how to use the software. I feel confident
in my ability to work with the Google Suite, but I do consider it to
be inferior to offline products such as Adobe or Office. The style
guide itself was created using Microsoft Suite. We were
encouraged to use AI tools to provide data for the audience due
to the impossibility of conducting full user research in the time-
frame of this project.
The style guide includes analysis and guidelines for TOMH's
presence on social media and their website. AI was used to
provide the background audience data, but the actual analysis
of the data was written by me. The style guide also includes sections on workflow, knowledge management, and tagging taxonomy.
Reflection
This assignment showed me how much depth goes into creating a functional style guide. I realized that standardization is more than fonts or colors. A style guide is a framework for clarity, consistency, and usability. Learning new tools while building guidelines for a real organization helped me to think about audience needs, and how to ease the burden of content creation for the audience.
