Guidelines And Standards Manuals

The word 'Guidelines' is in fashion, but implies flexibility. I prefer 'Standards.' The appearance and exposure of the corporate brand must be constant. In even the most entrepreneurial corporate culture where "all permissions are granted unless expressly denied," identity must be the great exception, in which all permissions are denied unless expressly granted. Otherwise, chaos will rule.

Edward Tufte says this well: "If there is a well thought-out design standard, it should be followed. In practice, great design comes from great designers. That is empirically the case. If a great designer did a first-rate standard, that model should be followed. Great design is not democratic; it comes from great designers. If the standard is lousy, then develop another standard." www.edwardtufte.com

Until 2000 or so, the best manuals were beautifully designed books, expensively produced to support their quality message and policy importance. Today, print is more often used for a beautiful "voice" brochure that promotes the corporate brand's visual impact to its employees while the heavy lifting, the nitty-gritty details and application templates, are on a web site. This solves the problems of aging manuals, their high cost and their rapidly declining respect and observance.

Some manuals are at least partly 'open' on the Web, and I will add well-designed examples below as I (or you) find them. For a longer list, see Hans Stol's "Catalogue" page.  Brands of the World also offers a long list of brand manual PDFs.

[Thanks to teacher Paulo Granato (e-mail) in Brazil for suggesting this page, and to URL contributors such as Hans Stol, Piotr Sierzega, Johnny Hood and Design Maven Frank Briggs.]

Note:  Jerry Kuyper's eight rules for effective manuals (at bottom of this page)

The experienced designer Jerry Kuyper adds these thoughts on "a few qualities I try to achieve in identity standards:"