Barbarian Style Guide

posted 04/13/08 by Rick Webb

3D – not 3d or 3-D
Adweek Magazine – not AdWeek or Ad Week Magazine
back-end – not backend
Barbarian Group – see “The Barbarian Group”
Barbarian – do not use this term on its own in reference to the company

INCORRECT: Barbarian will handle all programming tasks.

CORRECT: The Barbarians will handle all programming tasks.

CORRECT: The Barbarian Group will handle all programming tasks.

Barbarians – when referring to employees at TBG, do not capitalize “the”

INCORRECT: This is the fourth award won by The Barbarians this year.

CORRECT: This is the fourth award won by the Barbarians this year.

before – should be used instead of “prior to”
capitalization – in titles, capitalize both words of a compound word; do not capitalize the word after a prefix.

INCORRECT: Co-Founder INCORRECT: Used-car Salesman

CORRECT: Co-founder CORRECT: Used-Car Salesman

click-through – not clickthrough
co-founder – not cofounder
commas – when writing lists, use a comma before the conjunction

INCORRECT: apples, bananas and carrots

CORRECT: apples, bananas, and carrots

company names – in informal text, leave off legal designations

INCORRECT: Tecmo, Inc.

CORRECT: Tecmo

EXCEPTION: Press releases

Crispin Porter + Bogusky – no commas should be inserted into the name
e-business – not ebusiness
e-commerce – not ecommerce
ellipses – don’t use them
email – not e-mail
Flash – capitalized if referring to the programming language or the DC Comics superhero; not capitalized if referring to light or opening of raincoats
front-end – not frontend
homepage – not home page; word should be avoided when possible
hyphens – Hyphens are used in compound words. Dashes (specifically, em dashes) are used for various grammatical reasons, including amplifying or explaining. Hyphens should not be used in place of dashes. Spaces do not precede or follow dashes.

hyphen: -

dash: —

internet – not Internet
intranet – not Intranet
Java – capitalized if referring to the programming language or the island of Indonesia; not capitalized if referring to coffee
minisite – not mini-site
online – not on-line
prior to – generally considered poor English; use “before”
realtime – not real-time
royalcarribean.com – not Royalcarribean.com or www.royalcarribean.com
SoHo – SoHo is the neighborhood in Manhattan South of Houston street; Soho is an area in London’s West End
spaces – use only one space after all punctuation; do not use two spaces after colons and punctuation ending a sentence
The Barbarian Group – not “the Barbarian Group” or “Barbarian Group”
URLs – see “royalcarribean.com”
web – not Web
website – not Web site or web site
work – a person works at a company or on a website; sometimes the company name is the same as the website (e.g., TheStreet.com)
write-up – not writeup

Here are some recent posts from our employees about Barbarian Style Guide:

-r != r.

I stopped using -r when I noticed Rick using r. and went on to type out my whole first name. Im tired of doing that. Those extra 5 characters dont make things any better for anyone, so I am going back to -r and you can suck it if you dont like it.
-r

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