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The Style Guide: Creating Harmony Between All Your Knitting Patterns
Do you know what a style guide for knitting patterns is? Do you wonder if it’s truly a valuable document for a designer? Read on to learn more.
Hello everyone!
Have you ever had a collection of books in a series?
Maybe, they are by the same author. In my home, we have such a book collection. When all lined up on a shelf, they have a similar appearance to them.
These books have details and information presented in the same layout consistently across all the books. It gives an attractive, harmonious look to the book series.
A style guide is a tool used to give knitting patterns, from a designer or publication group, a unique and consistent structure and appearance across all their patterns.
What is a Style Guide?
A style guide is the guidelines, set by a publication group or a designer, on how their pattern should be organized and look.
The guidelines are often presented in a document that can be sent with a knitting pattern to a tech editor.
These guidelines dictate what information the knitting pattern is to include, certain phrasing of terms and words, and the location of each piece of information within the pattern.
In a knitting pattern, some details the style guide contains are as following:
- If a photo is to be included and where to put it.
- What font (Arial, Times New Roman, etc.) is to be used throughout the pattern.
- If you present measurements in US customary and metric units or just one or the other.
- How you abbreviate different terms.
- How you list your sizes.
- How you phrase certain knitting instructions like binding off.
A style guide can be very detailed. Its goal is to help those involved in creating a pattern give harmony in appearance and content across all the self-published patterns by a designer or to match those of a publication company.
As a tech editor, if you have a style guide, my job is to make sure that your pattern matches those guidelines.
How to Create a Style Guide
If you are a knitting designer, there are a few different methods of creating a style guide.
First Method
I’m also a knitting designer as well as a tech editor. There are some patterns that develop in my knitting time that I want to make available to others.
When I wrote my first pattern, I spent a long time mulling over the details!
Does this font look clearer than the font I had before? Does having my metric measurements in brackets keep them from visually mixing with my customary measurements? How many photos do I want in my pattern? I want lots of pictures to show the pattern, but no one wants to waste ink.
When I had a pattern that was structured and appeared pleasing to me, I sent the pattern to my tech editor letting her know that this was also my style guide, standard for how I want my future patterns to be structured and appear.
She checked my pattern for consistency within itself.
Knitting patterns that I wrote later on were also checked against my style guide, also known as my first pattern.
Second Method
A more structured and standard way of creating a style guide involves writing all your guidelines and rules down without a pattern full of knitting instructions.
A great example of this is the Style Guide from Knitty that designers who publish through them are to follow.
At the bottom of this post, I’ve included an example of this type of style guide that I created for my own pattern writing.
Third Method
If creating a style guide is something you would like assistance with, numerous tech editors, including myself, offer the service of creating style guides for you.
We can work together to create a style guide for your knitting patterns that you are excited about!
Can Style Guides Change?
Before I understood them better, one thing that concerned me about a style guide was that my pattern style was written in stone after creating my style guide.
I was concerned that if I learned a better way of doing something or wanted something different within my patterns, it would look unprofessional to change.
A style guide is not set in stone.
It can slowly change and adjust as you grow in your understanding as a designer of patterns.
The guide is to help you not reconsider the structural and appearance details of your written pattern every time. It can change with you!
Conclusion
Below, I’ve included an example style guide. When I decide to write up any knits that I’ve designed into a pattern, I use this personalized style guide. Seeing a visual example always helps me; I hope it helps you.
Have a blessed day, friends! I will be back with more to share soon.
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