Style guides
Creating company-level and product-level style guides is one of my absolute favorite things. Being able to fully step into a company’s ethos and defining how best to communicate to an industry or group of people is inspiring—and having a solid perspective makes sure that you’re always speaking consistently across an organization.
Below, I talk a bit about my process when creating style and tone guides, as well as offer a few examples of the guide I created to define Collective Health’s product and marketing tone.
Step one: Do your research
Understand the fire within:
What is the company’s mission?
Who do they feel they really are at the core?
Look at the landscape:
What’s the industry like?
Who are the competitors?
How do they speak? How successful is this tactic?
Find your differentiator
How can language make this product/company/mission stand out?
Define the narrative, find your emotion
How do users come into the fold of the company?
Why should using this product or service matter to them?
What does it do to improve their lives?
Step two: define design and content principles
Once you know who you are, and why—put a stake in the ground!
Along with two design directors, I developed the below design and content principles for Collective Health. These principles act as pillars and baseline standards for everything designed. If what you’ve made doesn’t check all four boxes…back to the drawing board!
Step three: the nitty gritty details
Defining the style guide for any company is reliant on the nuts and bolts that language is built off of. Below are two examples of my work to guide Collective Health’s member and client-facing teams in creating copy for any situation.
