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Open Educational Resources Collective Publishing Workflow

Apply Your Style Guide

Style Guides and Design

In addition to providing guidelines for writing and copyediting, style guides often also provide advice for formatting text and visual elements such as:

  • headings
  • body text
  • figures and tables
  • captions.

As with written elements, following the recommendations in your style guide can help you keep the design and layout of your textbook consistent across chapters.

Your university’s marketing department will likely have developed a brand toolkit with guidelines for choosing and applying fonts, logos and colour palettes, etc. These are often found on your staff intranet, along with in-house writing style guides. You may also need to check with library publishing, university press, graphic design or marketing staff at your university to see if there are any specific visual or branding requirements for publications produced in-house.

Keeping a book-specific style sheet will allow you to record in-house design guidelines, along with any formatting and design choices you make for your textbook.

Using a Pressbooks template will simplify design decisions such as font choice by applying a consistent visual theme throughout your book, and allowing you to create a matching cover. Pressbooks also allows you to customise templates to suit any specific author or in-house requirements.