Draft.dev’s Visual Style Guide

Published on Apr 11, 2024 in processes by Chris Wolfgang
3 minute read

If you’re curious what a completed Draft.dev article might look like, here you have it. This article serves as a visual demonstration of our house style (eg, our default formatting for text, code snippets, and images, as well as a peek into our copy editing standards).

What’s actually written in the text of this visual guide doesn’t particularly matter, but Lorem Ipsum is boring. So if anyone’s interested in why Draft.dev’s style guide is the way it is, they’ll find some insight here.

You can find the in-depth style guide used by our editorial team here, if you’re curious and want to see just how deep our attention to detail goes.

Why Markdown?

For starters, all of our articles are Google Docs written in Markdown. This ensures a couple of key functions:

Our clients don’t have to learn new tooling. The Google suite is familiar throughout the business world, from developers to marketers. So no matter who is handling a client’s content, they’ll most likely be able to easily work with a Google Doc.
Markdown formatting is universal. No matter the client’s content management system, their text editor will know exactly what to do with Markdown. Providing our articles in Markdown ensures that no unexpected formatting ends up in the client’s published content—no matter where they publish it. Any branded fonts and colors and spacing will lay out exactly as the client expects them to.

Markdown vs. rich text Want to see what the Markdown looks like before you put it in your CMS? Check out a Markdown editor like Dillinger for a preview.

Why Is Draft.dev’s Style the Way It Is?

To ensure consistency for all our clients, we’ve built a robust style guide for our editorial team to follow. Our style includes standards from a few common style sources, generally in this order:

House style. These are standards that our editorial team has decided on in-house. If our editorial team is unsure how to resolve an edit, they check this guide first.
Chicago Manual of Style. A common standard for long-form writing, the CMoS sets down rules for everything from formatting to comma use.
Merriam-Webster. The online collegiate edition is our go-to for spelling.

Note that Draft.dev uses American-English spelling and punctuation.

Headers Are Title Case

If a client’s content marketing has decided on any style standards, chances are they’ve made a decision as to how they want headers to look. Headers are typically a short phrase in a larger/more distinctive font to add structure and context to paragraphs within long-form content.

Draft.dev uses title case for headers of all hierarchy; that means most words (but not all; CMoS is very stern about this, sorry about that) in a header are capitalized.

If our clients prefer sentence-case headers (ie, only the first word is capitalized), we can accommodate that too!

Code Snippet Formatting Is Kept Simple

While short lines of code can be kept in-line (eg, <ButtonText>) with the rest of a paragraph, larger blocks of code stand on their own, like this:

<Buttons>
    <Button guid="guidOktaAuthVsixPackageCmdSet" id="MainToolWindowCommandId" priority="0x0100" type="Button">
        <Parent guid="guidSHLMainMenu" id="IDG_VS_WNDO_OTRWNDWS1"/>
        <Icon guid="guidImages" id="bmpPic1" />
        <Strings>
          <ButtonText>Okta Extension</ButtonText>
        </Strings>
    </Button>
</Buttons>

To ensure language-specific syntax highlighting for the code block, a client’s content management system will most likely require a plugin.

Conclusion

Draft.dev’s house style promises consistency and standard elegance through a highly detailed set of standards established by a team of experienced editors. However, if a client requires the use of their own style standards we can tailor our services to your style guide too!

By Chris Wolfgang

Chris Wolfgang was the first editor at Draft.dev. She’s been writing and editing for tech for longer than she would care to remember.