Good style guides need to be relevant, not generic; usable - not just good on the shelf; and empowering - a style guide should give a mandate to content designers. It should be the hill that we can die on. Here’s how Scroll designed a style guide for HSE Ireland.

To succeed, content designers need to balance our understanding of users and their needs with another kind of empathy – empathy for the stakeholder.

Rather than focusing on a specific piece of content, IA development is an opportunity to work across an entire website, and reorganise information in a way that best serves the needs of users.

Content design was liberation for writers. Liberation from the tyranny of technocrats and jargoneers. Liberation from the Kafkaesque 29-stage approval processes…

Content design is powerful. By focusing on what their users need, and looking at the wealth of data at their disposal, charities can transform the way they communicate with the people they support.

Links can be a minefield for users. Content designers need to name and place them with great care. Misusing links is one of the easiest ways to make your content inaccessible, confuse users or lose them for ever.