Manual Front Cover

People don’t really care what your covers look like. The $1,000 manual I bought had a black and white cover on plain 20# text paper with a thin plastic protective sheet over it.

My covers are on 80# cover stock with some spot color. They are not fancy but they look fine.

What’s important about my covers is that they have common elements from manual to manual so they look like what they are—part of a growing library of educational materials. I’m bothered when I see a speaker’s collection of materials—books or manuals or tapes—and none look like the others. To me, this looks like the speaker just gathered up everything he/she owns—and stuck them in a package.

I use common elements of size, binding, cover color, ink, design layout and font size and type to give my materials the look of continuity—part of a system. I use my photo on the front of each manual but change the actual photo (the photo on the cover of this manual is a good example).