Everyone hates standards and being told what to do. Everyone
hates the standards, except the person or group of people who put them
together. I’m one of those people. When I’m presented with a grammar style
sheet someone else made, I almost always want to change it because of the way I
learned grammar or the way I believe it is best to write. I basically believe
my way is best – I can most likely do it better and make it look better. In
other words, I am like most of the world.
However, I do understand that style guidelines and
grammatical conventions exist for a reason. These standards exist to improve
and help our communication. Most writers and copywriters follow a style guide
that covers the proper way words should be spelled, the proper placement of
commas, and the proper way to number lists, among a variety of other topics.
These style guides also generally guide the tone and written style of the
content. For example, a style guide might indicate the proper way to instruct a
user to click on a button in a software help manual. Further, most businesses
will have a comprehensive style guide that include the proper font choices,
font sizes, and colors to use for any work in both internal and external
documents. At the most basic level, you should be able to compare your business
cards and your work email signature to see that the two are most likely very
similarly styled. This adds to the professionalism of your company.
At SmartDraw, we have thought about style guides a lot. This
may be surprising because our software is used to create visuals, but following
a style guide for visuals is just as important as following style guides for
textual content. When we summon our inner Picasso to create flowcharts
documenting our business processes, we most likely are forgetting that these
flowcharts should be used as a tool to effectively communicate information.
It’s like summoning our inner EE Cummings when writing business correspondence;
the result may be artistic and represent something greater than the words we
voiced, yet its meaning is wide open to interpretation. There is a place for
the interesting and beautiful flowcharts, charts, and graphs we see in
infographics, but I’m not sure you can convince me of their use in the everyday
workplace. This is why we have found the concept of Visual Grammar to be so
important.
As visual communication becomes increasingly important in
business communications, visual conventions are more important than ever. For
business visuals to remain what they are, professional documents with the
purpose of clearly communicating professionally, they must adhere to some
pretty strict guidelines. Guidelines and coherent visuals prevent the wasted
time it would take to reinterpret each new visual encountered. After extensive
research, we’ve put together a collection of Visual Grammar guidelines for
professional visuals that solve specific communication problems we have
encountered. The guidelines achieve the goal of creating a homogenous
collection of visuals, such as flowcharts, mind maps, charts, and graphs, that
are easy to understand, look professional, and can accurately describe any
collection of data, no matter how complicated it may be.
Check out our white paper on Visual Grammar and watch the video below to learn more.
What do you think of these guidelines? Hate them? Love them? I want to know.
