The BBC’s Global Experience Language

I’ve spent the past hour or so reading through the BBC’s GEL (Global Experience Language). It’s an amazing design philosophy that unifies their online user experience. As they describe it, “GEL is the glue that ties all BBC services together.”

The design pattern is based on a 976px wide page that’s divided up into 61 16px vertical units. This allows the BBC design team a tremendous amount of layout latitude! Additionally, they’ve standardized their masthead and footer across all sites while still allowing local mastheads and channel backgrounds.

The BBC’s GEL is a great example of putting user experience first. I highly recommend that you take a moment to review the site and download their styleguide.

After downloading and playing with some of the BBC’s design elements, I became curious to see if other major media outlets have made their user experience guides public. Nothing jumped out in a couple of brief search queries. If you know of any, please link to them in the comments.

Also, take a look at the recently released Yahoo! Style Guide. It’s touted for learning how to write, edit and create content for the digital world. This will be next on my list for review.