Date
The Design Need:
You need to show a date on a website with an international audience.
Design Examples:
Design Solution:
Spell out the name of the month to avoid confusion.
There is an official international ISO standard describing date format (yyyy/mm/dd). This standard is not commonly known internationally and might still cause confusion. It is best to spell out the month or use an abbreviation such as Jan, Apr, or Oct.
When to use:
In all instances when you want to show a date on your website and if the website has an international audience. Typical dates that are used on websites are:
- the current date
- the last update
- publication date
- delivery date
Why use this solution (rationale):
There are various ways to notate dates, such as mm/dd/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy. Since you do not know how your international users normally read dates, using only numbers could cause a lot of confusion. For example, 03/04/2009 could mean either “the third of April 2009” or “the fourth of March 2009”.
