What’s a “web design manual”?
Published by Andreas Johannsen August 8th, 2006 in Terms' definitionsA 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:
Do you know of other good examples? I’d appreciate to hear from you. Just drop a comment here.
Personally I would prefer a web design manual (yes, I prefer that term as compared to the others you mentioned), to be part of a digital corporate design manual at least from a branding perspective. This is one of the things we have been struggling with for years: How to avoid having two corporate identities; One for printed material, one for online material.
also for colours it’s a good idea to decide on rgb and cmyk values for the pantone colours.
The way you use images should have some similarities no matter what kind of media you are using. The same goes for colours. The reason I’m writing ‘digital corporate design manual’ is that time has run out on the printed versions, why have a manual if you can’t distribute it easily, and if you want full control of you colours it is much easier to go to the print shop and check the colours than it is to compare colours with your small pantone samples
Little has been written about web design manuals, but perhaps it’s more interesting to talk about the corporate visual identity / design manual including online presence, and how that should be included.
Keeping manuals up to date is a generic issue that’s nevertheless always relevant
Good luck with the project.
It’s a good point that there should be one manual describing one visual identity. I’ve focused on the online part here because I’ve seen it so often neglected. Maybe I should treat the work on Web Design Manuals as a first step towards a guide the All-media Corporate Design Manual.