A quick guide to internal guides
Cover for the internal image design studio guide at Ipsos Karian and Box
During my time at Ipsos Karian and Box I put together lots of little mini guides to help both designers and non-designers understand smaller parts of larger subjects. The guides didn't have to solve everything, just help people get their head round something a bit better to save the next time from being a three hour problem to a half hour solution.
The guides would usually come together after a problem cropped up during the day and we’d solve that, then use the guides to quickly summarise what just happened, screenshot the actions and display them as quick steps.
One of the most well received guides I made was on image formats which helped a project manager understand better what she was asking for when getting images from and delivering to clients. From that point we also looked at changing part of our workflow earlier on for both screen and print which saved a lump of time later down the line.
Getting into the swing of the guides I worked out the sweet spot was about three to five actionable things to do - after that it was diminishing returns with people’s attention and my time putting the stuff together. If they wanted to know more, I would always add four or five links at the back to point them in the direction of more in-depth resources online.
I eventually got a nice little set together including:
Accessibility in InDesign and Acrobat: five easy low hanging fruits to get started
Subtitles and captions: easiest workflow to get it in and out of Premiere for different outputs
InDesign setup for Arabic: wrangling the finalised English version into a document that could have the translation into it
Data merge: how to slurp repeating data into Excel and InDesign
PDF editing and batch actions: automating bulk exports at the end of projects for non-designers
Making quick Sankey / Alluvial diagrams for Illustrator
Where to get started
Just aim to solve the small things, you won’t cover everything in one go and it will eat up your time if you don’t reign yourself in.
Look at making a guide specific to your team. I found that I lost focus or could end up going down rabbit holes (“oh, what if we ended up doing this…?”) by thinking too broadly about the problem being solved.
I go through old notebooks to see if there’s any words around problems that crop up over and over again. (No notebooks? You could probably do the same with your emails). A quick search around these words is a good way of queueing up search terms you might have passed over the last time you tried to solve the problem.
