Kaeley Slaney | Communication Designer Kaeley Slaney | Communication Designer
Projects
- Employee Handbook

Employee Handbook

I was tasked with a complete refresh, rewrite, and overhaul of existing employee handbooks at Purdys Chocolatier, and the overall layout would have to work across 3 different versions of the handbook. Additionally, the People and Culture team at Purdys Chocolatier wanted to be able to do minor copy edits without involving the design team, so it was key for me to structure the file in a way where there was a clearly defined typographic hierarchy as well as appropriately labeled styles. The formatting had to be both intuitive and bulletproof, so that anyone editing would know what paragraph or character styles they should be using if there was ever a major content update.

Client: Purdys Chocolatier
Date: 2022
Services: Document Design

For this long form handbook, basic typographic styling was inherited from previous internal documents, but there were many conflicting paragraph styles, as well as styles that needed to be created or updated to fit within the new framework. I cleaned up and refined all of the paragraph and character styles in a way that can also move forward into other internal documents at Purdys, as well as established proper line spacing and baseline grid. It was also important to add in automation into the body copy in the form of GREP that prevented orphans to remove the need of combing over every page to readjust paragraphs and line lengths after every copy update. As legibility is key for long form documents, a 2 column grid breaks up the line lengths more comfortably with a good amount of negative spacing for the eye to rest in.

I selected the displayed spreads to present a large variation in the formatting styles, showing the interactions between text and image, title spreads, headers, sub-headers, and sub-sub-headers, and how the body copy works within and alongside tables and lists.

As this is an internal document, I thought it best to dummy out the body copy to protect any potential proprietary information, but the character length, paragraph amount, and overall layout remain the same.