Content style guides

There are some excellent editorial style guides out there that you can decide to adopt. We reviewed our favourites.

But for the ultimate in stylishness, it’s hard to beat having your own style guide.

A good style guide also saves time and money, allowing different teams, agencies and freelancers to function smoothly together and create great user experiences.

Elements of style

Style guides mean different things to different people. Developers see them as a source of code; to designers they’re about visual identity; editors think of them as defining rules about capitalisation and spelling.

We think that the best style guides combine strands of work to become a invaluable tool for anyone creating or working with content.

Everyone’s style is different, but we like to include:

Voice and tone

Voice defines how the brand is expressed in words and pictures, and tone describes how the content flexes in different contexts, without losing its sense of identity.

We create examples of different aspects of an organisation’s personality that put the voice and tone into practice.

Content principles

Foundational beliefs about content and how it’s produced keep everyone rowing together in efficient and effective harmony.

Editorial style

How you write as an organisation  – how you use punctuation, how you capitalise – should be consistent and intrinsically connected to who you are.

Messaging

Carefully chiselled building blocks of content can be especially useful for describing an organisation and its work.

How we make content style guides

We prefer to build style guides that live and breathe online, rather than PDFs that tend to get filed away and gather digital dust.

We use a static site generator to create online style guides that are:

• easily accessible on any device,
• beautifully usable,
• lightning fast,
• easily editable and
• not a technical drain on resources.