The Importance of Formatting and Design

As a content editor, you should never have to set the guidelines for your company's formatting and design rules, but you will have to ensure they're followed within your company's content — especially if your writers are responsible for creating visual assets.​

​Formatting and design guidelines may include things, like fonts, colors, logos, and more. They communicate your company's design standards to your whole group and make your life easier by providing a solid framework to reference when you edit.​

​Cohesive design guidelines also ensure your content is distinguished from your competitor's. This cohesion is important because it helps establish a strong brand voice that resonates with your audience, which is essential for building brand awareness. The best brands stick in our brains because their presence is defined by the repetition of the same logo, fonts, colors, and images. ​

​Let's start with typography. This isn't just the font you use in your company logo. Typographic guidelines can support your blog design, like the font you use to publish your articles, the links and copy on your website, slide presentations, and even a tagline to go with your company logo.​

​These can vary, but it's best practice to use fonts within your company's logo or outlined in your company's style guide, since doing so will help create consistency. Some companies allow titles, headings, and paragraph copy to be written in different fonts, while others prefer to work within one font family. Be sure to distinguish between these and provide feedback when there's misalignment.​

​Colors should also speak to your brand and be unified across all content. A color palette is a group of colors a company uses to design its brand, and it guides every piece of visual content the brand creates. You need to remain recognizable. Your color palette can be as simple or as elaborate as you want, so long as your content doesn't deviate from the colors your brand identifies with. An oversight like this can lead people to question your authenticity and status in your industry.​

​Picture the most recognizable brands you can think of. Chances are, you've learned to recognize them because of the consistency across their messaging — written or visual. The same brand colors are reflected across their content, and the language sounds familiar.​

​Here are some more common formatting and design questions to keep in mind when reviewing content:​

• ​Should the images align to the right, left, or in the center?​

• ​Should text wrap around images?​

• ​What are the RGB and hex codes for text and headers?​

• ​Can writers use italics, bold, or underlining? If so, is usage limited to certain occasions, like bolding headers and hyperlinks?​

• ​Which kind of bullets should be used (square, round, or other), and how should they align with the rest of the text?​

​This list isn't exhaustive, especially since companies are continually changing their formatting, design, and UX. Be sure to regularly collaborate with your design and marketing teams to maintain alignment and update content as necessary.