Styleguide: 150 pages too much?
Out of context: Reply #11
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- luckyorphan0
Style guides can range from a twenty pages to almost 200. It all depends on the corporation, what it does, and what the execs demand is in the guide. I'm doing one now that's gotten to 64 pages, but it has no web in it yet. It's pretty easy to break down multiple areas of a company's reach into several sub-sections, and that can easily reach >100 pages.
Also, different vendors or users will often ignore the portions of the guide that does not pertain to them, and focus on only the areas that speak to their needs. So there is nothing wrong with large chapters not being used by some involved with the company.
To deal with this, we created internal and external versions of our guides. This is because the in-house team handles all of the product package design and collateral that is included with it (owner's manuals, quick-start guides, product registration cards, etc.). But there is no need to send that info out of house to global regional directors, since they won't be dealing with any of that. So, the external version has stuff for marketing and promotions (ads, POP comps, etc.), and is much shorter.
So in the end, verify all of the potential audiences that might find this document useful, and edit out all of the information that these audiences might find less than useful.
But if you're showing one keyframe per page of an animated gif...then...perhaps you may want to streamline things a little bit.