Styleguide: 150 pages too much?
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- Geith
I'm a stickler (or is that sucker) for details. I'm thinking maybe this is overkill. 150 pages? Sheesh. This is getting out of hand.
- bulletfactory0
depends on how many elements and how detailed you need to be - seems like the GE style guide was that long.
- ESKEMA0
whaa?
- Kiggen0
overkill.
- duckofrubber0
The Shell style guide was at least that long when I last did any work for them 5 years ago.
- gramme0
Overkill. I did one that was almost 100 pages once, and I seriously doubt anyone, upon being confronted with that behemoth, every gets beyond the first few pages. Sad, really, because I spent significant parts of a two-year period working on it, even through corporate upheaval and relocation of headquarters to another country.
I think if you can possibly keep it under 60 pages, you're good.
- plash0
depends how big the company is and how relevant the data you are conveying. Abbott Labs is about three thousand pages and covers everything from email signatures to convention displays and everything in between.
- e-pill0
what is the style guide for?
150 pages of rules or 150 pages of naked chicks and 1 page of rules??
- one is more visual! :-Pakrok
- That'd be 151 pages, of course.luckyorphan
- doesnotexist0
depends really
I know 3m guide is huge
how much shit does it go through? retail, packaging, logos, books, signage, web, &c?
- lukus_W0
If it's got a good index, and has specific information / use-cases for real-world scenarios that designers encounter, maybe it doesn't matter how many pages it has?
- akrok0
for christ sake, stop having 36pt as copy. lol.
- 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.
- dijitaq0
the company that i worked for did projects for a multinational company, their branding style guide, i'm sure, was over 150 pages. they had a section on almost every possible situations down to how to position their logo on a pen and pencil. even on how to animate their brand keywords in motion design related projects.
and like what luckyorphan said, they also had a scaled down versions of the style guide depending on the needs.
- cannonball19780
Provide guidance for the styleguide. If it breaks 50 pages, you need to provide an index and a table of contents.
- Oh, and don't forget to provide style as well. After breaking 10 pages, it'll need some or you'll lose the audiencemonospaced