The Global WordPress Marketing Team markets WordPress and its community to the wider world.
Style Guide and Brand Book
Topics
The purpose of this guide is to provide structure and consistency to the content created and published by the Marketing Team for Make WordPress.
It contains guidelines for voice, formatting, fonts, colors, logos including Wapuu and badges, as well as a link to our recommendations on SEO best practices.
Voice Voice
The Brand Voice within the Make WordPress teams and front-facing copy is a stewardship that should be taken seriously. Having a friendly, yet professional voice is a good approach for both internal and external audiences.
The Make Marketing Blog is a friendly, educational source of information for those within the WordPress Project as well as WordPress users at large. Therefore, we consider any published work front-facing, regardless of its distribution mechanism or effectiveness. We put our best work forward, regardless.
We don’t overly decorate the text with emojis, for example, or us GIFs in our published documents. Screenshots should be labeled and captioned and images should have appropriate alt tags.
For readability, we aim for 5th to 8th grade reading levels. A bit of humor is allowed as long as its tonality isn’t demeaning, as much as that can be anticipated. We suggest that our collaborators use hemingwayapp.com as one of our tools to determine readability.
Writing educational copy that isn’t documentation should take on a persuasive style, allowing for repetition, analogies, and familiar idiomatic expressions.
We realize we’re not writing for English readers alone. Should any of the persuasive copy be sent for translation, it is our recommendation that translation teams be allowed to translate the thought.
For consistency, the Marketing Team has decided on the following grammar rules.
Grammar Grammar
- Use the Oxford comma.
- Punctuation inside of quotes.
- US v UK spellings for consistency.
- One space after a period.
Additionally, because we collaborate on copy in Google Docs, we ask consistency regarding formatting, spacing after periods, links, and, of course using suggest mode any time revisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. are made to written copy.
Formatting Formatting
- Please use suggest mode for copy edits.
- Please use ugly links instead of linked text (linked text (link))
- One space after a period.
- No formatting other than headings.
- Hard returns after paragraphs.
WordPress Logo & Marketing Icon Usage WordPress Logo & Marketing Icon Usage
As the Marketing Team, we will adhere to the standards set forth by the Foundation.
We also have our badge, its usage, the Wapuu Badge GoDaddy made, and a custom Wapuu named ’Tinguu.
“The Japanese pronunciation for marketing is “maaketingu”, and wapuu is Japanese so Maaketingu + Wapuu = Tinguu” Ali Darwich.
‘Tinguu – The Marketing Team Wapuu
Fonts Fonts
Open Sans Regular
Open Sans Extrabold
Open Sans Semibold
Color Palette Color Palette
- Marketing Aqua 74C 9M 50Y 0K Hex #5FB292 95R 178G 146B
- Marketing Mustard (complementary color) 24C 29M 92Y 4K Hex #BFA349 191R 163G 73B
- WP Blue 97C 44M 26Y 3K Hex #21759b 33R 117G 155B
- WP Dark Grey 65C 60M 60Y 45K Hex #464646 70R 70G 70B
Image overlays: Image overlays:
Marketing #2E705D
GDPR #4B3FA5
Basic WordPress #21759B
Case Histories #AC86B5
Development #3E577A
Business #935144
Surveys #AABC6C
Tutorials #22D9E0 & #B78815
Imagery Style Imagery Style
Image style to remain consistent with a photo background, title in the lower left of the 1200 x 628 px image, with the overlay according to the topic.
SEO Standards SEO Standards
The Marketing Team is recommending the following for on page, off page, and best practices for content marketing and findability both for Google SERPs and Open Graph tags.
Please refer to the guidelines here.