Out with the styleguide

[budafist]

I have a client that we do a lot of work for. They've got a massive volume of a styleguide which they are very strict in enforcing. I didn't write it, I just follow it.

Oone of the people that work there have this big project where he's rubbishing everything in the styleguide. At every turn I remind him of the colours I can use, the fonts, the grid system etc. I originally designed the whole thing sticking to the styleguide and he was pretty mad. He said that I hadn't put any creative thought into it and I was just copy and pasting it into my template (not true).

The new design that I have done for him now is quite beautiful, but it's just not what the look should be. He says not to worry about it, it's on his head. But it's not that I'm scared of getting into trouble.

I'm worried that when it goes to get approved (by the people there that ok expensive things like this), it will get rejected. 2 weeks work down the gurgler...

Anyone take these risks?

[urstwile]

How far off the mark is he rubbishing the style guide?

Here's a story: back in the day, pre-Mac, in-house, all that stuff, I used to work at a place where we had several different agency clients, all of whom had a piece of AT&T. Now AT&T has a MASSIVE style guide. All of which was used "al dente" by the different agencies we did the work for. We had to know for example, that Chapman Direct didn't condense the ampersand in body text whereas O&M Direct did, little niggly stuff like that.

It may be that it feels like two weeks down the drain for you, but if you feel the work is beautiful, and your project manager (?) is allowing you to bust out in such a manner, well, maybe it will be accepted, maybe it won't, but it seems like it'll be more on him than you. And you get the satisfaction of knowing you got some freedom to bust out of the "grid" and do some beautiful work. Can you put that in your portfolio?

I hope they go for it. :)

[budafist]

He's done away with pretty much everything in the style guide. Colours, fonts, page layout. I've kept 1 of the fonts we're supposed to use. I'm not even sure if it's a good idea to put this in my portfolio.

My client is very well known and their style is so *just so* that if I did show future employees, they might think I was being ridiculous with such a different look for them. On the other hand, they might think I'm rad because I got away with throwing their styleguide out the window.

Upside is that it's not freelance work, I get paid my normal hourly rate whether it's accepted or not. On the other hand, I happen to know that for this job, my hourly rate is at around 5% of what the client is paying the company. That's a pretty damn good mark up! Client pays company, company keeps 95% and pays me 5%. Granted I doubt very much I could get this client all on my own, hopefully in the future when I go freelance this client will throw some design my way!

[budafist]

Well, it's been approved by everyone that needed to approve it.

It's in the printers hands now. It ended up being a $30,000 print job, so yeah, I was a bit nervous!

[Samakimoto Graphics]

Good for you for getting it approved.

We have an in-house style guide, called a publishing policy. It can get messy especially when we outsource very large docs for design.

Two and a half weeks ago a publication was being laid out in Norway and the "usual suspect" publication guides were followed, it was brought to me to look at, as the chief designer was away, and I could relate with the designer as I drew red "X"s and drew red guidelines over it. When I sent the PDFs with my changes, I had to apologise to the designer for marking it up that way, it was a good design otherwise.

[BJMRGTIVR6]

If your work is "better" than the style-guide they use, maybe you could convince them about updating the style guide. Maybe the old style guide was just so-so and you can create one that is more elegant and fitting if teh old one is Old.

[budafist]

The old style guide is outdated for sure, but it was *million dollar* project. I wouldn't want to step on any toes!

I know that other people in the company feel it is outdated, but it is such a huge company, I'm not sure it would be a task merely for me.