Style Guide Question
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- gramme
For those that have designed & written style guides: if the guidelines are mainly for in-house secretary types (who are just now learning InDesign) rather than designers, and you want to make sure no one ever tries to re-create the logo from scratch, what is the point in showing the logo's construction? I've seen/done both ways. Sometimes people diagram the crap out of the logo, and then again sometimes they just show it without describing what's under the hood, so to speak. Just wondering what you guys think.
- gung_hoek0
no point really. if a document should appear a little thin though, i´d sure inlcude a part like that just to increase the quantity (content-wise). yes?
- e-pill0
secretaries should use powerpoint
- gramme0
This is for my church, I want to avoid them designing anything as much as possible. They produce a weekly worship bulletin and a monthly newsletter. We designed templates, they will be updating them each week or month. Other than that, I want them to have to do as little thinking as possible, which is why we're doing a style guide with rules like "clip art is never acceptable in any official publication. If it cannot be communicated via type and/or image, it's not necessary."
- e-pill0
^^ use filter i remember a thread about style guides and a few good decent links matched with it.
- gramme0
The guide needs to be short and simple, so I think I'll forego the scaffolding. Thanks for the feedback, gung_hoek :)
- e-pill0
i was going to say that some fast feedback
- i_monk0
Your newsletter is going to be replaced with clip art and Comic Sans, it's just a matter of time.
- e-pill0
can you supply the logo with the guide??
- tparsons0
Hey Gramme...
For things like this that you don't want them to touch able to fill in new content.. we've created dynamic PDF's this way they can only add content where content is allowed. Can't screw with the layout and fonts are predetermined when making the PDF.
- gramme0
@ e-pill – of course. We'll give them a disk with all artwork, not just the logo and its variations, but the InDesign docs for bulletin & newsletter as well.
The good thing about me being a regular member is that if people Comic Sans that shit up, they'll have to answer to yours truly :)
- the only time i use fonts is on QBN. good luck sorry i couldnt help.. much.
e-pill
- the only time i use fonts is on QBN. good luck sorry i couldnt help.. much.
- gramme0
The tricky thing with the bulletin, nevermind the newsletter, is that they usually have at least some of the songs printed in their. The music director has a program that outputs an eps vector file of the words and musical notation. It's a different size each time. So, they need to be able to not just edit text, but images as well. I don't know if Acrobat alone could do that. They've already bought the whole Creative Suite at any rate.
- bulletfactory0
i agree w/ e-pill, no secretary should ever have to open InDesign. That's what designers are for.
- gramme0
Bullet, did you read my posts above? The church can't afford to pay my company to update the bulletin every week, not even to update the newsletter every month. I would practically become their in-house designer, working for free, if I was in charge of creating every single new document. It's a full-time job that has been done until now in Publisher. That's why we're creating templates with locked-down text boxes, Opentype fonts, clearly defined character & paragraph styles, etc. etc. Hopefully they won't have to make many aesthetic decisions if I do my job well enough.
- bulletfactory0
^ I had opened this thread, then got busy, when i typed and hit broadcast there were only 2 replies, when it refreshed there were 12 - my bad.