Web Design Manuals Blog

After a period of radio silence this blog is going to resume activity. Firstly, I’ve been invited by Janus Boye to present my thoughts about Web Design Manuals at the cmf2006 conference next week in Århus. I’m also invited to host a roundtable discussion about the conflict between the traditional top-down managed corporate identity and local communications initiatives such as blogs (thanks, Thomas, for leading me to this). I’m really looking forward to discussing the topic at the conference. Hope to see you there.

Next, I will devote more time to writing this blog/book from 1st December. I’ve quit my job at Synkron and will be working freelance from this day.

Stay tuned

I’d love to hear your comments to this proposal for a structure of the book.

1. Introduction - who is it for, why bother etc
2. About web design manuals
• What are they?
• Who are they for?
• How make one?
3. Elements and structure of a web page
4. Documentation of the design
• Site structure
• Page structure
• Colours
• Fonts
• Links
• Navigation
• Logo use
• Images use
• Media use
• Standards compliancy
5. Making the web design manual
• Use of examples
• Guidelines, rules, principles
• Publishing the design manual

What do you think? Have I completely missed something important?

I’ve decided to publish my forthcoming book under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. This means that you are not going to be able to buy it anywhere. When it’s finished you can just download it if you want it.

Why? Three reasons.

1. Many people have helped me, directly or indirectly, form the thoughts behind the book and many more will - hopefully. I’m not charging them for the help.
2. Publishing a book will not make me rich. Not even close.
3. I’d much rather reach out to a lot of people than a few who buy the book by a mistake

When researching for this book I come across many interesting sites. I first bookmark them to my del.icio.us account and then select the best to the link section on this blog (they are at the sidebar to the right). If you want to check all my research bookmark, just look under the “webdesignmanuals” tag on my del.icio.us profile: del.icio.us/andjohan/webdesignmanuals.

A web design manual is made to enforce a company’s visual identity on the web. It defines acceptable colours and fonts for use on the web pages. It describes accept-able use of logos and other visual hallmarks. It may even offer ready-to-use tem-plates for web pages.

The web design manual is sometimes made as part of a graphic identity or a design guide. The web design manual then concentrates on the web aspect of the com-pany’s communication.

Sometimes, the web design manual is made public available on the website, and I’ve found that universities in particular are publishing their web design manuals. I suppose the reason is that a university is a very complex organisation with many sub-organisations that all have need for publishing their own sub-sites with a high degree of autonomy.

The web design manual has many names such as

• Web style guide
• Web design guide
• Web style manual
• Web publishing style guide

…and all possible combinations of above I prefer the term web design manual because I want to make a distinction to a guide to writing content (such as the brilliant Economist Style Guide) and because I think that there is less degrees of freedom than a “Guide” suggests.

Here are some examples of web design manuals that I’ve come across:

• Carnegie Mellon Web Publishing Style Guide
• Georgetown University Web Style Manual
• TDC Designguide

Do you know of other good examples? I’d appreciate to hear from you. Just drop a comment here.

I’ve been wanting to write a book about web design manuals for years. Since November 2002 according to my first notes. This week I red Seth Godin’s posting Advice for authors and Shel Israel’s Are you using a blog to promote your book?. Reading those postings kicked me to set up this blog so that I can get the book written finally.

So, how do I plan to use the blog in the writing process? I hope to get into discussions designers, project managers, marketing people and others involved in designing web sites from both the client’s and the producer’s side. I’ve been blogging for several years and I’ve always been overwhelmed by how much I learn when the comment field is open.