Today, we make Rest of World’s Visual Style Guide public. We started establishing our visual style nearly a year ago – starting with our logo, then color, typography, and product design. Our style was captured through meetings and Slack messages, and as the design lead, I kept a lot of this in my head. 

As Rest of World publishes more stories (ICYMI – we hit 100!), embarks on new projects, and works with more photographers, illustrators, and animators, our visual consistency becomes more important than ever – especially as a new publication and brand.

Here are instances of this guide in action:

  • Typography and Fonts: Words are most of what we do, and they are how readers will consume our journalism and use our site. Choosing a typeface was like casting an actor in a play, and combining them was like evaluating if these actors had chemistry. We chose three typefaces: Moderat, GT Sectra, and Input Mono, playing different typographic roles: story fonts, brand fonts, and UI fonts.
  • Diacritics: More commonly known as accent marks, these glyphs are used in many languages to change the sound value of a word. For example, the cedilla (as in ş) is used in Turkish, French, Portuguese and several other languages. The circumflex with the underdot (ộ) is less common, and appears in Vietnamese. This visual element playfully reflects the creative nature of our brand, and the incredible variety of cultures and communities we cover around the world. While most prominently featured within our logo, they also appear throughout our site and off-platform in various ways as patterned banners, alternative menu icons, story chapter separators, and more.
  • Partnership Guidelines: Rest of World regularly publishes stories — both original and translations — in partnership with publications around the world. In this style guide, you’ll find image specifications and cross-promotional guidance.

At other organizations, style guides often live internally and sometimes as a PDF. We’re excited to make ours public, as a living document on a webpage. If you’re partnering with us on a project, we hope that this style guide is useful for you. And if you can’t find what you’re looking for, feel free to reach out to jody@restofworld.org.