Content design overview

Content design (often called UX copy or microcopy) is a strategic element of design that's just as vital as visual design and layout. By treating words as part of your design process instead of a last minute add-on, you can ensure an effective, intuitive, and human-centric product experience. Our content design guidelines serve as a central resource for all UX roles—including researchers, designers, developers, and content strategists.

By following our content design guidelines and recommendations, you can design with words more strategically to:

• Create clarity and consistency across products and applications.
• Make products sound more conversational and human.
• Use written content to create unified, on-brand experiences for all users.

As much as possible, PatternFly components and website resources will already adhere to our content guidelines and our brand voice and tone. However, our content design guidelines don't provide a complete list of all writing rules or serve as strict requirements that cannot be deviated from.

To help you align your UI content with PatternFly's voice and strategic content principles, we offer a variety of writing resources.

• Brand voice and tone: Defines the unique voice and tone standards that ensure consistency and humanity across PatternFly products.
• Best practices: Offers foundational advice for integrating words into your design process, ensuring intuitive and human-centered experiences.
• Accessibility and localization: Guidance on writing for inclusion, supporting screen readers, and adapting content for global audiences through localization.

Our grammar documentation includes common writing mechanics and style rules.

• Capitalization: Rules detailing which casing style to use for different UI scenarios.
• Numerics: Includes rules for displaying and formatting dates, times, currency, and numerical values.
• Punctuation: Rules for using punctuation properly within UI components and long-form content.
• Sentence structure: Guidance on point of view and sentence voice to ensure clarity and active, user-focused language.
• Terminology: Outlines the preferred terms to use across different UI scenarios, including a list of words and phrases to avoid.
• Truncation: Guidance on replacing overflow content with ellipses to manage text when display space is limited.
• Units and symbols: Rules for displaying units of measurement and shorthand symbols.

Tactical advice for specific types of content.

• CLI handbook: Detailed guidance for designing and writing content for text-based command-line interfaces (CLIs).
• Error messages: Best practices for writing effective error messages that are clear, actionable, and empathetic.
• PatternFly design guidelines: Guidance on structuring and writing content specifically for PatternFly's design guidelines on the website.
• Product tours: Best practices and tone advice for writing content for product tours and onboarding flows.
• Tooltips: Guidance on writing tooltips, including specific rules for certain icons.

While we provide thorough guidance across our content-design guidelines, the following supplementary resources might also be useful.

If you're writing for Red Hat products and find conflicting information in these resources, default to PatternFly's guidance.

• For component-specific microcopy guidance, see the component's design guidelines.
• For microcopy guidance that’s not included in this guide, see IBM Carbon’s UX content guidelines.
• For Red Hat product terminology and documentation standards, see Red Hat's supplementary style guide.
• For additional terminology guidance, use Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary.