LibGuides Style Guide

As a university, John Carroll generally follows the Associated Press style guidelines for publications. 

For bulleted lists, if the bullets form complete sentences, they should be punctuated as complete sentences. If it is a list of single words/short phrases, do not punctuate. E.g.:

• This is a complete sentence, and should be punctuated.
• If the bullets complete an introductory text that ends in a colon, the bullets should be punctuated as if they end the sentence that introduced them.

Below is an example of a simple list of items, without punctuation:

• Milk
• Juice
• Coffee

Please maximize accessibility to the best of your ability. The links below have many great tips and tools!

• We are using the "side-tabbed" navigation layout, which has a "zero" box under the tab navigation, and a single column of content to the right of the tabs.
• The contact/profile box fits well under the tabs in the "zero" column. If you have it in the main content column, make sure your image size is appropriate. One note: the "zero" column is the first thing people will see after the tabs when scrolling on a mobile phone.
• Fonts, font size, tab/box colors, etc. are part of the overall system guide style for the library. If you have a compelling reason why these need to look different on a particular published guide, please ask the University Librarian before changing these.

As much as possible, links used on LibGuides should be made using the "link" asset type, not as links in the "HTML/rich text" box. Sometimes this is unavoidable, but especially when listing resources, please use link assets or database assets. Why? Because the Springshare link-checking tool cannot find broken links in rich text, but will detect them when done as assets. Check links regularly!

NOTE: We no longer encourage using a "contents" box on guides. The contents are represented in the tab titles and do not need to be repeated. Please delete these. HOWEVER, having a navigation box on the main LibGuide page with pertinent links to material within your guide is fine, especially when it brings together key material that might be found under different tabs. 

   The icon set already loaded into LibGuides CMS is the Font Awesome version 4, some examples of which you can see here.  

These icons can be resized, have different colors, be links, etc. Please see the documentation for more help.

Icons can be used to bring visual interest to a page, but should be used in a relevant way and not superfluously. An example of the coding for an icon is: <i aria-hidden="true" class="fa fa-binoculars fa-2x"></i>

• Images should be used to make a page more interesting, but should be relevant to the guide and not impede the user's access to the content. 
• Images should be uploaded to the LibGuides "Image Manager" in the shared folder for anyone to use. Feel free to use subfolders to group images together.
• Be sure to add alternate text when uploading your image, so that it will be included every time the image is reused.
• Credit images reused from other webpages/free image sources. E.g.:

   

"Bibles" by tormol is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0