Forums: Design:

Working on a project to revamp the 'image' of all promotional / internal printed materials for a newspaper holdings company. Things like quarterly / year end reports, partnership promotions, promo packets and the dreaded Employee Handbook. And of course, they want to start with The Handbook.

Question is, if I decide to use photo assets, should they depict the company and its product, or should the photos be geared towards the employee experience?

I've dug around online looking for samples, but i can't find that many examples ... and those that I did find, appear to be raw .pdf or word docs.

Anybody have any experience with this? What do your employee handbooks look like?

Thanks.

ours are text only... with way too many rules

but if they were being spruced up

I would use more-generic vector illustration of people, employees and such
or just spruce them up with a masthead and footer... or sidebar

Pictures should convey ideas, not specifics. Generic is the way to go - because people leave companies, products fail etc etc.

Sounds like the decision is completely up to you as there's no precedent - carte blanche! Go nuts!

Were I in your shoes, I'd do mockups of both approaches so the people in charge could feel like they were "part of the process". You look good and make them look good, which always plays out well.

i've done some quarterly/annual reports for a client before, and i usually just stick on stock photos of people in business situations (ie meetings, shaking hands, etc...) they usually love them. I just find images that reflect that section of the report.

thanks for all the feedback ...

Ari: that's the plan ... Although it's guaranteed that they will pick my least favorite/biggest pain in the ass design in the bunch. And since I just found out it needs to be dichromatic (purple & green), it's RIPE with bad design possibilities.

Thanks again.

db