Audience-Purpose-Occasion
Guide Specifications are critical for Neogard. They contain information for specifiers—the people who determine what products to use on a construction project. Guide Specifications give them detailed information on our coating systems, including everything from physical properties of the products in the system to instructions for preparing the surface and applying the materials.
We write them in the Construction Specifications Institute (CSI) SectionFormat style. Every specification refers to a CSI six-digit MasterFormat section; each section deals with a segment of the construction industry. Sections within the Guide Specification are numbered, and paragraphs are in multilevel lists. That format allows specifiers to easily find information and integrate it into their own documents to submit for a project.
Notes
Application: Microsoft Word. Typeface: Arial.
The current Neogard Guide Specification template is adapted from the PDS template previously used worldwide by Hempel, modified with the Neogard logo, colors, and with data formatted for the U.S./North American market. The template was made in Word, and includes a hierarchical list with paragraph styles for the sections, and automated section numbering and indents; this greatly speeds the creation of these files, and ensures accurate section numbering.
I’ve received good feedback on this new design. Our customers and internal technical and sales personnel find them far easier to read than the old versions. I converted all our Guide Specifications to this new format earlier this year.
I have included a sample of one of our most complex Guide Specifications, Decorative Peda-Gard. This system has many material options, depending on the project requirements. Click the image below to view it.
Click here for the complete list of Neogard Guide Specifications.
Previous Guide Specification Design
Our previous PDS design was created in the mid-2000s, when Neogard was part of the Jones-Blair company. (Jones-Blair was acquired by Hempel in March 2015.)
The old template was made in Adobe InDesign. While that gave the designers more flexibility than Word, it also made it nearly impossible for anyone other than the company’s technical writers to work on a document.
I made many updates and improvements to the old Guide Specification design, and created improved templates to speed the writing process. In particular, my templates used paragraph styles to automate section numbers and the multilevel paragraph lists. We had a serious problem with duplicate section numbers and mislabeled paragraph lists; previous technical writers were making those lists manually.
Typefaces: Swis721 BlkEX BT Black, Xerox Sans Serif Wide, Arial.
The image below links to a PDF sample of the old PDS design. The .INDT file is in a linked .ZIP.
