How to keep documents with example full date timeless
I am writing a corporate guidelines manual.
The manual itself is made in InDesign, and contains sample documents in it that show employees how to correctly write/format despatches.
These documents (made in Illustrator) have made up dates on them, which include the year, to exemplify a real written despatch.
This manual will be printed and distributed and cannot be updated later on, therefore I am trying to find a way to not have it be aged by the dates contained in the documents. I would still like to show a full sample date so to avoid ambiguity and misunderstanding for the employees reading it, but sticking '5 may 2016' in the sample documents contained in the manual would make it obviously outdated in 2017.
Now, I want to keep these documents from looking outdated in a year, without having to update it every year though, and I can't figure out how to do so while including the year.
How could I achieve this clear exemplification while keeping my manual timeless?
EDIT: Edited the question based on comments to make it clearer.
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1 answer
You are concerned that a document containing a recent, past date (like from last year) will make readers think your document is out of date. One way to address that is to use dates that are obviously not recent -- Jan 1 1970, Dec 31 2037, etc.
If you have a section in the frontmatter about document conventions (the place where documents sometimes talk about special formatting), consider adding a note there saying that you've used ficticious dates in preference to placeholders like "YYYY".
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