Uncle Sam's style guides

I filed a public records request with the U.S. Geological Survey for any style guides covering mapping and data viz.

I got back a ton.

Rule books, fonts, color palettes and even the Adobe Illustrator templates for the agency's cartography.

It's all on GitHub.

The most fulsome document is this illustration guide, which I've published to DocumentCloud.

It includes examples of the agency's more complex data visualizations, which you rarely see in the news biz.

The U.S. Geological Survey's official sans serif typeface is Univers Condensed.

The official serif is Times New Roman.

Okay. Sure. The real weird thing. They have a custom font called FGDCGeoAge with symbols for geologic ages.

Want it? The TTF files are here.

I also received similar guides from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

I've acquired its data viz style guide via the Freedom of Information Act.

It recommends:

Sometimes making pies

Avoiding 3D

@YAN0's y-axis advice

An internal chartmaker based on Highcharts

Here's the whole thing.

Just in time for NICAR 2019, I got back my FOIA for U.S. Census Bureau design rules.

Every style guide from Census 2000 to 2020 is now public on DocumentCloud.

NASA's graphics standards manual and stylebook and Office of Communications manual cover copy and design.