It strikes me that there are lots of problems with style manuals, those definitive pieces of documentation that accompany a completed design solution: Clients want them to be a comprehensive set of full-contigency bylaws governing the usage of the designs they’ve paid for, but they frequently balk at the necessary time and expense that’s necessary to produce anything so complete. Designers want to deliver a sound set of pliable guidelines that will continue to do justice to their work, but even with a capacious budget, they can’t possibly provide enough all-encompassing logic to stand in for design talent absent from a client’s payroll.

These conflicting circumstances usually result in style manuals full of what I like to call ‘rote specifications’; thick booklets packed with granular details on sizes, measurements, colors and rudimentary “do’s and don’ts” for the usage of a design solution. Unfortunately, these are usually constructed to appearimpressive above all else, relying on the sheer quantity of detail to justify to clients both the full expense of the design process and to evince the apparent sustainability of the completed design.

At best, they’re superficial documents with limited usefulness; like blueprints for television homes, they’re interesting in their intricacy, but of limited practical value in real life. I’ve seen many style manuals that, while voluminous, were useful for only a handful of factual attributes: PANTONE colors, typeface specifications, and grid measurements, for instance, but little else. One could have easily been reduced these manuals to a handful of pages and they would have proven just as useful.

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