Brand & Style Guide Update and Quick Tip 💡

Submitted by Leslie Marinelli

It's been about six months since the launch of the FCPL Brand & Style Guide. As mentioned in the original announcement, this is a living document which was expected to change over time, and indeed it has. 

Keep reading to see what we've added and deleted, plus a quick style tip guaranteed to take years off your appearance with just one keystroke! 

A number of small edits were made throughout the document over the past few months for the sake of clarification or to remove items no longer relevant to us (bye bye RomanceBookCloud). 

We revised the social media section with our new handle: FoCoLibrary. 

We also revised one of the subsections on Inclusive Language based on some excellent feedback from staff. 

Two new sections have been added this week: 

File Naming Guidelines

Communico Entries Standards

Just a reminder, the guidelines documented in the FCPL Brand & Style Guide apply to all staff and we encourage everyone to bookmark/favorite this document for easy reference. 

And now, as promised, a quick tip to highlight one of our branding standards you may have missed! 

This can be a tough one for some of us of a certain age: spaces between sentences. 

Per the FCPL Brand & Style Guide, our standard is to use only one space between two sentences. 

I know this is contrary to what many of us were taught when we learned to type on monospaced typewriters back in the day, but the modern standard is to use just one space after a period. 

This can be a hard habit to break, but it's worth it. Two spaces between sentences is an outdated format that nonverbally communicates the writer and/or organization is archaic. That's not the message we want to send. 

If you're struggling to drop the two space habit, here's a hot tip: use the "Find and replace" function in your document to find all double spaces and replace them with a single space before you publish anything.