Am I being hyperbolic? Bear with me. I am onboarding a new client who sent over some reading material including the most inspiring and confident style guide I’ve ever seen. I can’t wait to crank out thought leadership pieces for this company.
A style guide is a boring-sounding list of content formatting rules including headline capitalization, imagery guidelines, tone of voice, banned words, and more. It’s something every content operation wants, needs, and tries to create (been there, done that), but often sits last on the priority list because, well, it’s boring and we have Big Important deadlines.
This one is not boring. It gives me a defined list of industry terms the company wants to use, and buzzwords to avoid. It tells me the content should share insights address pain points, not product details. It alerts me that we don’t bash our competitors, and we talk about ourselves as supporting traditional methods, not replacing them.
It also gets into the boring rules of capitalization, punctuation, and grammar rules.
Why does this matter? Because artistic freedom + a prescribed structure = creative but consistent branding. Consistency creates trust, and people buy from brands they trust.
As a creative, I want to focus on messaging, not punctuation. I want to create stories, not structure. A good style guide means I can put all my energy into compelling content and capitalize fully on the trust that this brand has already built.