This style guide is primarily for MailChimp employees, but we hope it’s helpful to other organizations as well.

If you're looking for the MailChimp Content Style Guide website, visit styleguide.mailchimp.com.

Whether or not you work at MailChimp, we welcome your thoughts and suggestions. To learn more about sending us feedback or adapting this guide to create your own, see the Contributing file.

If you’re forking this style guide, here are some formatting tips.

This guide is a collection of Markdown files. This is a plaintext format that easily converts to HTML. Read more about it here. Be sure you name your files without spaces with either an .md or .markdown extension.

The files in this guide are prefixed with a double digit to set order. Make sure your file starts with a number that will place your new content in the desired position (eg: 04-) and change the prefixes of the other files to reflect this change in order.

Markdown is handy because you can write your content without HTML tags. Here are some tips to help you control the layout of your text.

If you want a line to break to the next line but don’t want to start a new paragraph, end the line with two spaces. This will render a <br> tag.

The best way to prevent widows is to type   in the space between the last two words in a title or paragraph.

Tables can be written in Markdown by following this general style:

| header 1 | header 2 |
| -------- | -------- |
| cell 1   | cell 2   |
| cell 3   | cell 4   |

The spacing is not important for the table to be rendered properly, and the cells do not have to line up. However it does help with readability when creating and editing tables.

When displaying HTML tags as text in content, be sure to wrap them in backticks, eg: `<h3>`.