32 - Yellow is a divisive color, and other things I learned about incorporating accessibility standards, data viz guidelines, and feedback into a style guide

Abstract Information: I am an evaluator at a mid-sized evaluation and statistical consulting firm, and I created the company’s first-ever style guide in 2019. While I do love graphics and design, I am by no means a graphic designer. The first iteration of the style guide included basic branding guidelines related to the use of our new logo, colors (which mirrored the colors used on our updated website, one of which was yellow), and fonts. While we had a color theme and several chart, report, and presentation templates in Microsoft Office prior to having the style guide, the style guide was helpful to document our branding guidelines to be used across our teams, projects, and platforms. A few years after rolling out the style guide, the evaluator in me was curious to hear staff feedback on what was working, what was challenging, and what was missing from the style guide. The feedback that I gathered pointed to some needed changes to the current branding to better account for accessibility and some additions to the style guide to provide staff with more guidance related to colors and data visualization. And it was clear that you were either on Team Yellow, or you were not. I organized a task force of several staff to help draft an updated version of the style guide and incorporate staff feedback. Like any research project, this process took twice as long as expected. In our updated style guide, we accounted for basic accessibility standards in our colors and fonts. This included adjusting the colors to account for color contrast and color blindness and starting font sizes at size 12. We also included guidance related to technical accessibility, such as adding alt text to charts and using the Check Accessibility feature in Microsoft Office. The inclusion of accessibility standards was important to us to allow for our evaluation reports and so forth to be accessible to everyone, and to make it easier for staff to make that happen. In addition to our style guide’s existing section of branding guidelines, we added a new section of data visualization guidelines since data visualization is a big component of our work. This section includes examples of 15 different chart types as well as examples of maps, qualitative visuals, and a table. Each example outlines when to use that chart type, what your data should look like, and includes annotations for some of the chart elements (e.g. directly labeling a line chart rather than using a legend). The data visualization guidelines section also includes several chart/table makeovers and guidance on accessing and using images and icons. This poster will summarize some of the feedback I gathered from staff on our company’s first-ever style guide and the resulting changes we made to our branding and style guide.