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Overall principles

Simplicity is core to us. To paraphrase one of our major source of inspiration, The Economist style guide, clarity of expression follows clarity of thought. Hence, the rule at Buzzinbees is to say things as simply as possible:

1. never use a metaphor, hyperbole or cliché that you are used to see in print;
   avoid: we bring unparalleled performance to the most demanding operators.
2. never use a long word where a short one would do;
   use record as opposed to track record, about instead of approximately.
3. if it is possible to cut out a word, cut it out;
   a key priority is probably just a priority, and resources that are freed up are simply freed.
4. never use the passive where you can use the active;
   this system delivers up to 10,000 transactions per second is better than 10,000 TPS are delivered by this system.
5. never use a foreigh phrase, a technical term, a scientific word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent;
   a phone number is better than an MSISDN number.
6. break any of these rules rather than say anything outright barbarous.

Similarly, visual simplicity drives understanding. Here, we are followers of Edward Tufte and his masterwork, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

Writing rules

A few rules are emphasized below, but in doubt, refer to The Economist style guide. There's one major exception though: we use American English spelling and grammar as opposed to British English. Hence we realize that labor is hard.

Equaly hard are grammar and usage rules for those of us who are not native English speakers. The best is to look up words in the Longman dictionary of contemporary English which provides usage and grammar information.

Abbreviations

Always spell abbreviations out when using them for the first time in a document or web page, unless the abbreviation is so familiar to the general public that it is used more often than the full form. Hence, use the full form of all technical terms; write HLR (home location register), intelligent networks (IN) but don't spell GSM out.

For abbreviations that are well accepted in our trade, put the full form within parentheses following the acronym: SMS (short message service). For less common abbreviations, do the opposite: automatic device detection (ADD).

For plurals, simply add an "s" to the abbreviation: APIs stands for application programming interfaces.

Respect case for abbreviations, especially for metric system units: write kHz, not KHz (which would be Kelvin Hertz, the product of a temperature with a frequency), or m.N for the unit of couple, with a dot to disambiguate the double meaning of m (milli- without the dot versus meter with the dot), but not MN (megaNewton which is a unit of force!). Distinguish between the milli- and mega- prefix (m and M): mW for milliwatt and MW for megawatt. The same applies to financial units: a m€ is a tenth of a cent, while a M€ is a million euros. Never use two solidus (/) within a unit, prefer negative exponents to disambiguate, e.g. 1 Pa is the same as 1 N/m² which is the same as 1 kg.m^-1.s^-2 (on the other hand 1 kg/m/s² could mean many things including 1 kg / (m/s²) !).

Capitalization

The simple rule is to avoid using upper case, except for proper nouns (people, places, companies…) or where it is required by English rules, e.g. at the beginning of a sentence. Write the internet, the euro, the pope, the web, the queen. When spelling out abbreviations, use lower case too: e.g. MAP is the mobile application protocol, no need to capitalize every word. If you want to emphasize the relationship between the letters of an acronym and its spelled out version, you can emphasize letters, e.g. automatic subscriber activation (ASA).

Buzzinbees

Buzzinbees is always written in full, never abbreviated. Except in internet addresses, its first letter is capitalized while all other letters (including the second b) are always lower case. Despite ending in "s", this is a singular noun.
Hence we write: Buzzinbees is a private company, it sells software to its customers…
Buzzinbees's possessive is regular and is formed by appending an apostrophe and an s to Buzzinbees (it is uttered like buzzing busies).

Units

We use the metric system and its prefixes. For dates, we use the ISO 8601 form yyyy-mm-dd (which is easily sortable). Hence, January 2nd 2005 is 2005-01-02. For durations we use hh:mm:ss, and for times we use the ISO 8601 form including the time zone when needed (using the Z suffix for UTC i.e. Zulu time). For instance:
2004-07-04 14:30 is the 4th of July 2004 at 2:30pm in the local time zone.
2001-01-01T01:01Z is one hour and one minute in the morning of January 1^st of 2001 in Zulu time (ex GMT, now UTC).

We never use week numbers, as these are ambiguous: the US system is different from the European system, there are at least 6 different systems in use.

Visual rules

All our documentation is written for the web following standard XHTML (extended hyper text markup language). Rendering is based on cascading style sheets (CSS2.1 now, CSS3 as soon as possible) so that we can easily provide variants for our OEM customers.

Hence we only include semantics in our XHTML source, and we ban all presentation or typographical elements. For instance, we never use <b> to indicate some text should be bold, we rather use the form <strong> which carries meaning. Nor do we ever specify font size or color in our XHTML source, leaving it to CSS to decide how text is presented.

Furthermore, we use "liquid design" i.e. we never set table or picture sizes in absolute units, so that smaller or larger screens can properly display our content and so that readers can resize their browsers. Similarly, our CSS uses relative font sizes to allow readers to enlarge or reduce text as they see fit.

Fonts

We use 3 fonts in our documents:

1. Georgia, a serif font, is used for body text in web and printed documents. Microsoft designed this font for best legibility on computer screens but it is fit for printing.
2. Verdana, a sans serif font, is used for document titles, captions, foot notes, side notes, and textual table content. Verdana is also used for slides and spreadsheets.
3. Courier New, a monospace font, can be used for code excerpts and for text that requires absolute character alignment.

Font size is specified by CSS, usually 10pt for body text on screen. For presentations, the minimum font size is 16pt.

Color is also set by CSS, to strike a balance between contrast and reading comfort: main text is typically set in dark grey, while titles and headers are set in black (or white when the background is red).

Color palette

Refer to Tufte for best use of colors. Another excellent source is the color brewer tool from the US national science foundation.

At Buzzinbees we only use few colors. Here is our main palette:

Should you need a diverging color scale, the following red tones match their grey counterparts. But never use these colors in isolation !

The following cooler tones also match their grey counterparts. You can use the first two colors to highlight rows in tables.

Finally for status indicators you can use the additional colors listed below, combined with status signs, but never use color as the sole indicator of status: over 5% of the males and a smaller percentage of the female population suffer from some form of color blindness ! In any case, avoid mixing red and green tones: instead of using green-orange-red, use violet-orange-brick to mix with status indicators. Hence avoid: Ç, Æ, È , and rather use: Ç, Æ, È.

To get an idea of how these palettes are seen by regular, deuteranope, protanope or tritanope viewers, upload your page to Vischeck. Here's how our palette looks:

Logo and product images

Clicking on the Buzzinbees logo below (400 pixels, PNG) will lead to a full size image (9181 pixels, PNG):

We use this logo in our letterhead, presentations and other official documents.

Clicking on product logos below will lead to larger PNG versions:

The Buzzinbees and product logos are registered trademarks of Buzzinbees SAS and are protected by copyright. Please contact us in case you want to use them:
contact@buzzinbees.com

Pictures and diagrams

We use the following rules to determine which format to use for pictures and diagrams:

• For drawings and other computer generated graphics, use PNG (see wikipedia PNG), as this format avoids compression artifacts and keeps geometric lines clean irrespective of scale.
• An even better format is SVG (see wikipedia SVG), as this format allows for truly scalable diagrams. Unfortunately, Microsoft is late in supporting W3C standards: while all major browsers support SVG, IE8 does not support this format yet. We will migrate to SVG when Microsoft is ready.
• For photographic pictures, the best format is JPEG (see wikipedia JPEG), as it achieves good compression while preserving high quality.

Here is a comparison of the two available formats (also see this jpeg-png comparison for better magnification).

To the right is the JPEG image. Its original width of 120px has been scaled to 225px to highlight the artifacts caused by compression. The original file size is 1927 bytes.

To the left is the PNG image of the same original width and scaling. The original file size is slightly larger, at 3742 bytes. This clearly shows the superiority of PNG for computer generated graphics, at the slight expense of file size.