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I am about to began the process of determining a format for our user guides.
They are paper documents on 8.5 x 11 standard paper. There are basically two
schools of thought.
One group of writers wants to use a format that "looks good" but has no
basis in instructional design (very grey pages, large bold headers, all
sans-serif fonts, etc.).
The other group leans more to the IMI school of thought (lots of white
space, labeling, chunking, accessible graphics, etc.).
I would like to ask the list what elements they feel are important to
include in the format and why.