Docs too similar?

[Nancy Allison]

I'm beginning to remember rather fondly the days when technical docs were kinda klunky and were instantly recognizable. 

In recent years, most of my clients have had gorgeous logos, color schemes, fonts, even stock graphics, that have been used in both marketing and technical documents. Because Marketing has generally called the shots for these design elements, the cover designs of the technical documents have often had this kind of hierarchy:

B!R!A!N!D!  N!A!M!E!!!!

PRODUCT NAME!

Component name

barelynoticeabledocumenttitle

All around are glossy-looking images and swirls of color that distract the eye from the text, especially the smallbarelythere text.

After working for several docs for a while, if I'm at all tired, I have to really focus to tell one from another. 

Maybe this is more a problem for me than for a user, since I may work on several docs of a docset at once, but the docs are visually so much the same, they become almost impossible to tell apart. The title is buried on the title page, the least noticeable part of all that design (because Marketing is obssessed with reinforcing the BRAND, not the particulars).

Typefaces, colors -- all the same.

Front matter -- almost identical.

Chapter organization -- quite similar.

Ok, ok, I admit the *content* is different and so are the running headers and footers. . . but why do I have to scrutinize the doc at that level before I know? Is it unreasonable to think that we should be able to tell docs apart at a glance?

In the funkier days, didn't tech doc groups do things like put red stripes on the cover of the User Guide and yellow stripes on the Technical Reference Guide? You know -- color-coding?

Even if a regular user sees only, say, 2 or at most 3 of the docs in a docset, they must still be hard to tell apart, all the more so when they're simply displayed onscreen as pdfs. At least with hard copy, you can take a magic marker and draw a black strip across the edge of the pages of one doc and instantly differentiate it from the others.

Am I overgeneralizing or overreacting?