Every content practitioner has received the brand guide.
It is thirty-seven pages. It has a section on logo clearance, a section on color palettes, a section on typography. There is a page of adjectives — three or four approved tone words, often contradictory (“professional yet approachable, bold yet measured”) — and three example sentences described as being “in the brand voice.”
The brand guide is thorough. It is also completely useless for writing content.
What bad brand guides are designed for
Most brand guides were designed for a design agency, not a content practitioner. They solve the problems design agencies have: which version of the logo goes on a dark background, what the minimum safe zone around the wordmark is, which Pantone colors are approved for print.
These are real problems with specific answers that need documentation. They have nothing to do with how to write a sentence that sounds like this brand.
The tone section — the adjectives, the examples — was usually added at the end of the brand identity process, often by the same design agency, because the client asked. It reflects what the agency thought the brand should sound like, filtered through what the client approved, filtered through the compromises that happen when an approval process involves multiple stakeholders who don’t all agree.
It is not wrong, exactly. It is not useful, exactly. It is a starting point that most content practitioners try to use as an endpoint.
How to work with a brand guide that doesn’t tell you enough
The brand guide tells you the destination. It doesn’t tell you how to get there. The gap is filled with questions — specific questions about the content you’re actually writing, asked of the people who know the brand from the inside.
“The brand guide says ‘authoritative.’ What does authoritative sound like to you in this context — are we citing sources, taking positions, speaking confidently without hedging? Give me an example of content from another brand that has this quality.”
“The guide says ‘approachable.’ What does approachable mean when we’re writing about a technical topic that most readers don’t fully understand? How do we write about this without sounding like we’re dumbing it down?”
Brand voice strategy at its best is not a document — it’s a developed understanding of how the brand thinks about its audience and what it wants them to feel. The brand guide documents the output of that understanding. If the guide doesn’t give you enough to write from, you need to develop the understanding it was supposed to summarize.
Building the document the guide should have been
The most valuable thing you can do for a long-term client relationship is build them a working voice document — the thing the design agency should have made but didn’t.
It is not thirty-seven pages. It is two to four pages. It contains: the three to five things the brand never says and why, the three to five things the brand always does and specific examples, the audience’s exact vocabulary for the problem the brand solves, and two contrasting examples — one that hits the voice, one that misses — with annotation explaining the difference.
This document takes six to eight hours to build, including the conversations with the client team. It saves that time on every subsequent piece of content you write for them, because you stop guessing and start knowing.
It is also one of the clearest demonstrations of the value of editorial leadership — the practitioner who builds the working standards the organization didn’t know it needed, which then outlast the engagement itself.
Jacob Clifton is the principal of Clifton Creative, an editorial strategy consultancy based in Austin, Texas. He spent fourteen years as a flagship staff writer at Television Without Pity and has written for Tor.com, Vulture, BuzzFeed News, and the Austin Chronicle.
For inquiries:
jacob@cliftoncreative.agency · Book a discovery call
Most brand guides were designed for design agencies, not content practitioners. They solve design problems — logo clearance, color palettes, approved typography — and add a tone section at the end as an afterthought. That tone section typically contains three to five adjectives (‘professional yet approachable’) and a few example sentences. This tells a content writer almost nothing about how to construct an argument, choose an example, or land a paragraph in this brand’s voice.
A useful brand voice document for content writers should include: the three to five things this brand never says and why, the three to five things this brand always does with specific annotated examples, the exact vocabulary the audience uses for the problems this brand solves, and two contrasting examples — one that hits the voice and one that misses — with explanation of the difference. Two to four pages, not thirty-seven.
When the brand guide isn’t helpful, capture voice through structured conversation rather than documentation. Ask the client to tell you a story about a customer who really got what they were trying to do. Ask what they want readers to feel after finishing a piece. Ask what they’d never want to be caught saying. Record the conversation and mine the transcript for vocabulary, sentence patterns, and the specific examples that surface naturally. That raw material is the voice guide that the design agency didn’t build.
Two to four pages is ideal. Longer than that and it won’t be read. A voice guide that actually gets used contains only the specific, actionable information a writer needs to make decisions: the things to do, the things to avoid, and examples that illustrate the difference. Everything else is documentation for its own sake. The test of a good voice guide is whether a writer can hold its key points in working memory while drafting.