Content Style Guide

Overview

This guide outlines the content standards and style conventions, focusing on UI documentation standards and Console terminology guidelines.

The 10 Commandments of Tech Content

Core principles for creating excellent technical content:

1. Keep it short and to the point - Remember your audience level & give only the non-obvious info.

2. Keep it casual - It's fine to use contractions. You can end a sentence/phrase with a preposition if it would be awkward not to. Casual isn't synonymous with fluffy, long-winded, redundant, run-on descriptions. Casual ain't an excuse for sloppy grammar.

3. Be consistent with existing writing style and structure - (except when consistency will hinder clarity)

4. Use consistent capitalization - Use sentence case for doc headings. Use Title Case for Meta-Titles and Blog Headings.

5. Keep search in mind - Think about how users are likely to search when choosing heading titles and deciding how to break doc pages. Each page should address a specific topic and each title should be useful in a search result. Avoid pages that contain only high-level intro info and/or links. Even top-level pages should teach valuable information, answer questions and/or give useful examples.

6. Keep SEO in mind, but... - Never let SEO take priority over what's best for users who are looking for answers. Do use invest effort in good meta-titles, meta-descriptions, and consult with the SEO experts for keywords on new pages. Don't implement SEO requests if they don't fit with the purpose of the page.

7. Proofread your first drafts & get reviews - Test your code examples (or ask someone else to if you don't have the right environment set up yet). Test your links. Re-read your short texts. Get at least one technical review and one peer review for any new content over 1 paragraph, and anything you aren't sure of.

8. Be generous with links - Link between guide & reference content. Link from blog posts to docs (but usually not vice versa). Link from docs & blog posts to demo apps and video tutorials. Add What's Next/Related topics at the end of pages when relevant, esp. from top level pages to lower-level pages. BUT avoid forcing a user to jump between links to learn how to accomplish a single task.

9. Terminology guidelines - Use 2nd person and active verbs whenever possible/reasonable. Avoid saying "our/we". Use "you want", not "you wish". In docs, avoid subjective words ("easy", "simply", "always", etc) and superlatives ("great", "best", etc). In technical blog posts or video tutorials, these can be used (but sparingly). See also: Text, Style and Wording Guidelines

10. Make your content visually appealing and easy to skim - Use bullets, bold signposting, tables, code, and relevant high-quality graphics to help break up paragraph text.

(11) Rules were made to be broken - But you better have a darn good reason...

Text, Style, and Wording Guidelines

Language

• Use American English spelling and conventions (e.g., "color" not "colour", "optimize" not "optimise").
• Avoid "Please" in instructions or error messages.

Title Caps

Title Caps means all words are capitalized except:

• Short conjunctions: and, as, but, for, if, nor, or, so, yet
• Articles: a, an, the
• Short prepositions: as, at, by, for, in, of, off, on, per, to, up, via

Connection words in hyphenated terms are also lowercase (e.g., Add-on, Plug-in).

All other words (regardless of length) and all 4+ letter connection words (About, That, With) are capitalized, including words after a hyphen (e.g., Full-Time).

Use Title Caps for meta-titles and blog headings. Use sentence case for doc page headings.

User-Defined Values

When referencing user-defined values (asset names, folder names, field labels) in text, surround them with single quotes:

• 2 assets were added to the 'myfolder' folder.
• Are you sure you want to rename the 'Red' collection?
• The date must be later than the one in the 'Start from date' field.

Example Values

Use these conventions for placeholder/example values:

• Email/web: mysite.example.com
• Names: Use clearly fake names — Alice Wonderlin, Bugz Bunny, John Jingleheimer
• Keys/secrets: Use impossible but realistic-looking values — ABCdef12345

Technical Terms

Common Spelling & Capitalization

Style Guide for Documenting UI

• When creating or reviewing UI strings, use the ui-string-assistant Cursor skill. You should just be able to ask Cursor about the string and it should invoke the skill automatically.

• Page or Tab names should be written with the same capitalization as the UI itself & shouldn't be bolded.

• Option names & section names on a page should be bolded (and no quotes).

• Option values—both list values & values to be typed—should be literal text (code tag).

• In general, first give the name of the option (or page, tab, section) and then what to select/enter in the option. For example: "In MyOption, select MyValue."

Use arrows to describe a path to an option. For example, In Settings > Upload > ThisSection > MyOption, select MyValue.

• As long as it's clear enough in the context, just say the name of the option & not what type of control it's:

  • "Click Submit" and not "Click the Submit button."
  • Select Apple, and not "Select the Apple check box."

Terminology

• Use 'select' for option values from a list. (not 'choose')
• Use 'enter' for something a user should type. (not 'type')
  
• Use 'click' for buttons. (not 'press')

Console Terminology and Guidelines

Account vs Product Environment

Where possible & the context is clear enough, avoid (remove) the word 'account' or 'product environment' entirely. Some examples:

• Upload assets to your account → Upload assets to Cloudinary
• Log into your Account → Log into the Cloudinary Console
• You can delete assets from your account by... → You can delete assets by...

When the context requires using 'account' or 'product environment', keep in mind:

Account-specific:

• Plans/pricing/billing
• Users (creating users, user roles, etc)
• Everything in the Account & User pages of the Settings
• A user can be given access to all or only some product environments, but the users & their roles are still defined at the account-level
• Provisioning API & provisioning credentials/SAML, etc

Product-environment-specific:

• Everything related to the main (Upload/Admin/SDK) credentials — cloud name, API key/secret — is per prod env (The title of the section in the Dashboard will be updated to "Product Environment Credentials" hopefully this sprint)
• Everything in the Upload or Security pages of the settings
• Assets are per prod env. For example, Search API is searching for assets that meet certain criteria within your product env, not within your entire account.
• More generally and a useful way to think about it, all the entities you can manage in the Admin API (resources, folders, upload presets, named transformations, search, etc) are all prod-env specific

Console Naming

• Either the Cloudinary Console or just the Console (if context is clear enough).
• Console always capitalized.
• Remove any instances of Management console or Account console or similar
• Links to the console are now all console.cloudinary.com/console/... This means no more relative links from docs to console - if you find /console/... in a link, need to change it to the full new URL.
• Use the names specified in this call out when referring to areas of the Console.

  

Settings

• Change 'tab' to 'page' - i.e. Upload tab of the Settings is now the Upload page of the Settings
• Settings always capitalized (assuming you're referring to a page in the Settings UI, as opposed to 'settings' as a general concept)
• Naming - Either Console Settings or just Settings if context is clear
  • Don't refer to the entire Settings UI as Account settings (You can use Account Settings when specifically referring to the Account page of the Settings and the context is clear enough)
  • All of the following are acceptable as works best in the setting:
  • In the Upload page of the Console Settings
  • In the Upload Settings, ....
    
  • In Settings > Upload,

Sub-Account

The word 'sub-account' shouldn't exist anymore except:

• In select places where clarifying that the term product environment was previously known as sub-account
• In the Provisioning API docs, where sub_account is still used in endpoints/parameters/responses (but the explanation is still explaining that it represents a product environment).

Account Setup Notes

For notes about behavior/UI that might be different for different users depending on account and/or cloud-level flags set by CS - or features that we make clear can be requested from CS (by them activating/clearing flags), we used to have some notes that started with "Depending on your account settings," which is confusing, since "account settings" sounds like it's something a user can change themselves in the Console Settings.

These phrases should usually be changed to use the word 'setup', and usually with the phrasing: "Depending on your account or product environment setup"

• If it's a note where we specifically want users to understand that the 'setup' actually impacts all PEs in the account or that it's a setup that can be different for different PEs, then specifically say "...on your account setup" or "...on your product environment setup"

CSS and Styling Guidelines

Word-wrapping Attributes

We had a lot of problems with word wrapping & word breaking in our docs. The goal is to avoid a word breaking to a new line in the middle of the word. This is usually problematic with code tag where it may be a very long string or a URL.

There are 2 CSS attributes that can help (or cause big problems) with this:

overflow-wrap: break-word (previously known as word-wrap)

From Mozilla: This option tries to avoid breaking in the middle of a word, and instead pushes the whole word to a new line (causing the above line to be quite short). If the whole word is longer than the space available in the line, in that case, it does allow a word to break in the middle rather than overflowing the container.

From Stackoverflow: This property specifies whether the current rendered line should break if the content exceeds the boundary of the specified rendering box for an element (this is similar in some ways to the ‘clip’ and ‘overflow’ properties in intent.) This property should only apply if the element has a visual rendering, is an inline element with explicit height/width, is absolutely positioned and/or is a block element.

word-break: break-word

To prevent overflow, normally unbreakable words may be broken at arbitrary points if there are no otherwise acceptable break points in the line. This attribute is especially valuable for (CJK) text.

From stackoverflow: Note: It is common to use word-break in conjunction with long strings (such as URLs or lines of code) when you want them to break at the container width — especially if the container is a pre element or table cell where the overflow-wrap property may not work as expected.

Usage Guidelines:

• The main place we found that we need it was for long code tags, for example a URL in the middle of a sentence. In that case, just overflow-wrap:break-word; still allowed the long URL to overflow the table cell.

• Adding both word-break & overflow-wrap with break-word value to the various code tags in the CSS solved the problem.

• However, using word-break:break-word in a table heading or table cell caused excess-wrapping. So if the HTML wants to make a cell smaller in auto-sizing table cells, it uses the word-break to let it break a word in the middle (even breaking after every single character) in order to make the smaller columns super-narrow and allow more space for the largest column.

• In table header/cell tags, the overflow-wrap did the trick, so that the small columns weren't over-wrapping, but long code tags inside table cells were wrapping as expected.

Summary:

• Use both for long code tags and URLs in table cells
• Avoid word-break in table headings or cells to prevent excess wrapping
• overflow-wrap alone is sufficient for table cells with long content

Dark/Light Mode Guidelines

Using Filters to Adjust Image Colors

You can use one image and adjust its colors for dark and light mode using filters.

Tools for creating filters:

• Hex Color to CSS Filter
• CodePen Filter Generator

If you don't get a perfect match, you can keep regenerating the filter.

Best practices:

• This works best if the original image is black with a transparent background
• You can then define filters to change the color for light mode and dark mode
• Define filters in app/assets/stylesheets/_dark.scss and app/assets/stylesheets/_light.scss
• Use same filter name for both modes

Example:

_dark.scss: scss --academy-icon-link-filter: invert(69%) sepia(80%) saturate(1730%) hue-rotate(177deg) brightness(100%) contrast(102%);

_light.scss: scss --academy-icon-link-filter: invert(20%) sepia(88%) saturate(1756%) hue-rotate(221deg) brightness(103%) contrast(98%);

_content.scss: scss .academy-icon-link { filter: var(--academy-icon-link-filter); }

Usage in markdown: html <img class="academy-icon-link" src="https://cloudinary-res.cloudinary.com/image/upload/w_90,f_auto,q_auto,dpr_2/docs/academy-logo-black.png" width=90 alt="Cloudinary Academy" title="Cloudinary Academy" style="margin-right: 10px;display:block;" />

Even if the whole image isn't one color, it may still work. See academy-logo-transparent.png which uses only a filter for dark mode.

Disclaimers

For some features, the user might have to request support to enable it. If so, that needs to be added to the text below. If it's a UI feature, then obviously we should adjust the warning about param names and implementation details to be about changes to the UI, etc.

Alpha Disclaimer

Beta Disclaimer

Title Guidelines:

In most cases, if we publish docs with this disclaimer, we should also put the (Alpha or Beta) in the H1 title (but not the meta or menu (TOC) title). For example, in en.yml: