Getting Started — Data Visualization Style Guidelines

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This document aims to provide a basic outline for creating a data visualization style guide for your organization. It leverages our collective knowledge to establish a basic set of best practices, but won’t go into great detail on specifics.

The goal is to create guidelines—not rules or immutable facts. Guidelines will change and evolve with the needs of your organization. It’s important to set this expectation and create a culture that strikes a balance between common, generic needs (which guidelines can address very well) and bespoke, unique needs which are unlikely to be met by a style guide.

A style guide should empower the people in your organization that creates visualizations by reducing the number of decisions they have to make. It restricts creativity as little as possible.

A style guide will help your team maintain a consistent brand by providing a unified set of styles, processes, templates, and tools. It will also increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your team by reducing the number of decisions they need to make when creating a visualization. But a style guide takes work to create and maintain. If your organization is small, it may not be a worthwhile investment

The venn diagram between a design system and a style guide has significant overlaps. But there are some important distinctions, the most notable of which is integration with software development teams. For instance, most design systems have tokens (variables) that capture decisions about color, size, font, etc. so they can be used by UI components (such as buttons). Changes to designs flow through these tokens into components libraries and products with very little disruption. A design system usually starts out as a style guide and only evolves into a design system if the people in the organization need those extra features and structure.

You may need to secure resources to build a style guide. Look to the teams that will benefit the most from these guidelines for funding. Demonstrate value in small ways—qualitative data may be enough—but also look for ways to attribute the costs of building and maintaining a style guide to the benefits the organization receives. Be careful not to underestimate the cost and need for maintenance. 

First and foremost, consider who will be using this guide. Make sure you understand and meet their expectations. If they want a PDF—deliver that. If they want a website, build it. Also, consider what tools you (and other guide authors) are most comfortable with. Can they use those tools to meet expectations? How difficult will it be to learn new tools?

If it is up to you, think about where the style guide can live that will be easiest for the users to find. For example, if the client is already used to consulting the design style guide for styles, consider integrating it there. In the best-case scenario, it would be located at a fixed, and east-to-remember url: www.organization.com/datavizstyleguide. 

A guide cannot provide value if it isn’t used. Stay close to your users. Spend time watching how they work and listening to their frustrations. A style guide should reduce those frustrations. If possible, avoid mandates—it’s always better to build something people want to use than to force them to use something they don’t. Measure adoption so you know who is and isn’t using the style guide—then find out why. Iterate.

It’s ok to start small. Even a single page of guidance can be useful if it addresses the needs of your organization. Set up an expectation for changes, updates, and iteration by using a versioning system and creating clear channels for communicating updates.

A style guide provides answers to common questions—solutions to common problems. But where do those answers come from? Seek experts in and outside of your organization to help you write guidelines. Workshops, books, and research papers will bolster your own understanding of the space. This is will have a collection of links and resources to get you started. Avoid leaning too heavily on any one source.

When creating a style guide, it’s important to establish basic principles about your intentions. These principles establish the criteria your organization needs to be successful. Include information about your mission and brand, but also address equity and accessibility. Avoid jargon and shallow generalities.