Jackie's presentation “By the Book: How to Develop a Company Style Manual” (a 184K PDF file) offers comprehensive help on compiling a style guide, encapsulating a dozen years of experience, mostly at Tetra Tech, Inc. in Santa Barbara. With her permission, we have added this item to our site's collection of best practice tools. Click the image to view or download the file.

Robin Dudley (third from left) later explained how she is making the transition from a small business owner to a marketing consultant, d.b.a. Dudley Business Development. After years in the car rental business, she's tapping her design skills and a passion for writing and advertising to help other businesses with their marketing needs. Although the start-up road continually challenges a new consultant, Robin's secret for success is simple: “Network, network, network”!

A little experiment leads to a breakthrough...

Keri Morgret, a technical communication specialist at Quintron, made a significant discovery recently in the area of user manual design. After finding it difficult to get company employees to read the typical 8.5" x 11" notebook-style manuals, one day she tried printing a copy on a new Canon copier/printer.

Since she was looking for a more user-friendly manual size for the field technicians, she started experimenting with the copier. She selected the automatic print-and-saddle-stitch feature, which caused the printer to automatically reduce, repaginate, staple, and fold the copies into little brochure-sized booklets. (For anyone familiar with what goes into designing a saddle-stitch format using a page layout program, the ability to do this on the fly is truly astonishing!)

Before long, Keri began to receive requests from many people in the company, including the president, to get copies of that “cute” little user manual. Now everyone wants to read it — go figure!