The Breaker: Style Guide

We want thebreaker.co.uk to showcase the best of masters journalism at Bournemouth. Every website has a style guide so that journalists know the ‘house style’ in terms of  consistent, professional output. Web editors need to refer to the style guide so that they can tailor stories so that they have appropriate headlines, pictures and hyperlinks.

for more on writing styles – refer to the The BBC News Styleguide.

1. Headlines

- No more than 34 characters – like the BBC, who operate with a similar length for their headlines, we work with a short headline length and we believe it helps gives the website a clean and concise appearance.

- Headlines should always be ‘Sentence Case’ – meaning only the first word and proper nouns are capitalised.

2. Excerpt Field

- No more than 66 characters – try to make it a complete sentence.

3. Hyperlinks

- Ensure all hyperlinks are titled.

4. Images

- All images should be personally sourced or obtained from copyright free websites (make sure original authors are attributed as requested).

5. Featured Image

- All ‘Posts’ must have a ‘Featured Image’ attached.

6. Featured Post

- If your story is going to be used as a ‘Featured Post’ on the site and appear in the slider, you need to make sure the ‘Featured image’ is at least 620px wide (the exact dimensions of the featured image is 620px wide & 350px high).

7. Categories

- Every story must be assigned to a category.

8. Tags

- At least 1 and no more than 6 per ‘Post’.

Logos

If you need to use logos on any of the branded content you create, use one of the following:

Landscape logo

Square logo

Colours

If you have to create branded images for The Breaker, make sure you use the appropriate colours as determined below:

• Homepage – #FF6600
• News – #FF0000
• Sport – ##33CC00
• Entertainment – #CC0099
• Issues – #336699
• Lifestyle – #ffd600
• Science – #66CCCC
• Technology – #6600CC

Font

The Breaker site uses the ‘Open Sans’ Google font – view font>>