In 1895, the editors of The New York Times created the inaugural version of the paper’s Manual of Style and Usage — a guidebook to the publication’s particular rules of grammar, punctuation, spelling and capitalization that remains an essential part of our newsroom toolkit. Since then, it’s been updated regularly to reflect the changing times (the word email, for example, appeared as early as 1985 and was styled as “e-mail”). In 1999, the first online version of the manual, known as the Stylebook, became available on the NYT intranet.
In 2013, when I was working as a mobile product designer for The Times, I helped to create an iPhone-only “app” version of the manual. This was a step in the right direction, but I wanted to do even more. I was interested in creating a new version of our living document that was more modern, accessible and usable.
So, in 2015, I started to reimagine and redesign the Stylebook as a fully responsive web app — one that could be used on any device, regardless of platform. Along the way, I considered the importance of search, ease of use, and of course, typographic elegance. I designed a desktop version, tablet version and phone version, all maintaining the same functionality.
Then came along this year’s Maker Week. During the kickoff meeting, I mentioned this project and asked if anyone would be interested in helping me push it further along. Sure enough, a flurry of emails started coming in. People from different departments, disciplines and backgrounds, including some I had never met, ended up forming the team. Over the course of five days, the Stylebook team (Chris Ladd, Nina Feinberg, Oliver Hardt, William Davis, Marie-France Han, Hamilton Boardman and myself) was able to build out a beautiful, fully-functioning prototype, complete with feature enhancements that are crucial to modern-day newsroom usage:
Newsroom editors have started using the prototype and are giving us plenty of feedback — we’ll be using this to continue to make improvements and resolve issues. We’re very excited about what we’ve created so far and know that it wouldn’t have been possible without all of the work that was done on the original version by Walt Baranger, Tom Brady, Bill Connolly, Ray Lewis, Merrill Perlman, Al Siegal, Keith Urban and Ted Williamson.