Re: style guidelines

["Susan W. Gallagher" <sgallagher -at- EXPERSOFT -dot- COM>]

At 11:27 AM 3/1/96 -0600, Ruth Glaser wrote:
>Any suggestions in the following area?

>We currently have a corporate Standards Manual that defines the content and
>format of the documents we produce. One of the major problems I have with
>this document is the number of different paragraph tags combining different
>fonts, sizes, justification, etc. It becomes too complex and looks terrible.

[snip]
>Does anyone have an opinion/rule of thumb regarding a maximum number of
>paragraph tags/fonts to use in a document?

I'm just doing some new designs for Expersoft, so this is something
that's on my mind right now.

What I've done is make a list of all the different kinds of
paragraphs a doc needs -- in our case, it goes something like
this --

        Headings (how many levels?)
        Body
           bullets (2 levels, 2 continuation paras)
           steps and continuation paras
        code examples
        headers & footers
        notes and warnings
        tables (heading, body, row label)
        sidetag
        figure label

Once you define the number of different paragraph types, you can
create a single style for each of them. Try to adhere to your
basic paragraph types -- exceptions are inconsistencies so you
really need to aviod them!

Keep to one or two font families and use different sizes and
weights within those families (this doesn't count any dingbats).

>How about good design book recommendations?


I like The Non-Designers Design Book by Robin Williams (peachpit press).
It's a quick read, gives some simple, common sense rules, and provides
a lot of inspiration.

-Sue Gallagher
sgallagher -at- expersoft -dot- com