The Best of Manual, User Guide, and Form Design

5 min readMar 12, 2019

Looking to design a manual or a user guide? Hire me via my agency, Threefifty!

An inspirational post which highlights some of the best manuals from various industries, while touching on some important points for each one.

I’ll be adding more worthy manuals and user guides as I come across them (mention some cool ones in the comments below), so be sure to subscribe or follow. Enjoy!

The big idea

If you need a manual, chances are your product is too complicated to use. The point of any product design, is to be so simple and intuitive to use, that it requires no manuals at all. Before embarking on the manual creation journey, triple check and make sure that this isn’t the case for you. If you still think that you’re in need of a user guide, keep reading…

Illumivision manual

Parental child approval forms (COPPA)

Re-designed and re-written from legal perspective to be more concise and more user-friendly + official Tinkercad keyboard shortcuts. I did all the form design and re-writing. Internal corporate lawyers confirmed compliance. These forms are downloaded by millions of students, their parents and teachers in order to onboard children under the age of 13. Last time I checked, Tinkercad was around 35 million users strong.

Print design for Autodesk Tinkercad (www.tinkercad.com)

Modular Magnetic user guide

Instruction manual for www.modularmagnetic.org — an open source 3D printed home design playset by Yuriy Sklyar.

Bunk Bed with no Screws manual

Designed by Threefifty, this manual takes on a simplistic graphical approach, similar to that of IKEA, though using color to tell the story. Bunk Bed with no Screws is an open source project by Yuriy Sklyar.

Glyphicons handbook

Glyphicons is a collection of web [font] icons, and as such, the manual picks up on a lot of cues from this particular industry. It’s also not shy about utilizing the product and making it part of the overall design.

Small details add to the uniqueness of this manual:

long blocks of text are split into smaller columns for better usability,
actions/steps are easy to notice and follow,
numbered lines of code create make it unmistakeably clear that you are indeed looking at code, and finally
the folder structure design makes it easy to distinguish the folder section from the rest of the manual copy and graphics.