Customer Reviews

Xerox Publishing Standards: A Manual of Style and Design

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An impressive work which has aged well. The design notes and example it sets transcend the print medium. This is the Platonic ideal of standards manuals.

I've been a technical communicator for 17 years, and bought this book when it first came out. With the advent first of electronic publishing, where everyone had to know something about layout and design, and next with the Internet explosion where even your dog's vet has a website, poorly designed or not, and now, the advent of XML, which will further drive the art of communication into the hands of the unskilled, this book is a gem. It is still as applicable now as it was then, and easily applies to electronic style guidelines as well as to print.

If you are at all interested in how people learn, how they consume information, what works in layout (electronic or print) and what does not, read this book. It should be mandatory reading for everyone who works in the 'knowledge industry', from tech writers to webmasters to information architects.

Desktop publishing has raised the bar on professional documentation. Consultants and other professionals need to be able to turn out volumes of reports, requirements documents, plans, and a variety of other professional documentation. It is no longer good enough that these materials are neatly typed on the page. Reports need to have an attractive, professional look to them.

The Xerox Style Guide provides a full range of advice on layout, style, and correct usage. I found the layout portions helpful in achieving page layout that looks highly professional and improves the comprehension of the reader.

The advice on writing clear is also helpful, and more concise than many other style guides.

This book is just what it claims to be: the standards of publishing used by the Xerox corporation, and as such it's not intended to serve as an off-the-shelf manual -- after all, it was written with only the needs of one company in mind. However, for those who are creating document designs and developing English-language writing standards for use in complex situations, this book provides not only good examples but also a clearly articulated rationale for document design. For instance, there is interesting commentary about why they decided on Optima as a corporate font for publications, why they use certain kinds of layouts (such as scan columns), and how they achieve what they believe to be the best possible usability in a document.

Though I have not found another handbook to be its peer in terms of page layout -- including printing and binding considerations -- I do think that this manual of design leaves a bit to be desired in the area of data presentation in tables, graphs and charts. On the other hand, it could be the case that more specialized books such as Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition are more useful in this area. If so, it would be up to the reader to graft Tufte's data display ideas with the overall page layout ideas presented in the Xerox standards.

In terms of linguistic guidance, the particular spelling and phraseology guidelines in the manual are clearly tied directly to the technology and communications business environment in which Xerox operates. Nevertheless, using this manual as a guide may be simpler than modifying generic styleguides such as The Associated Press Stylebook 2009 (Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law), whose rules I find to be too closely tied to a journalism to suit my needs.

As a final point, I think it is worth noting that I find this book to be a valuable reference despite its age. In fact, this book continues to serve me well, so much so that I recently purchased a second copy for use away from my primary office. Again, the material in the guide has no temporal relevance; the rationale is a clear and sound today as when it was originally published, although we certainly have witnessed a sea-change in the area of high-quality print-on-demand in the past decade.