How do you create and maintain content style guides and standards?

Inconsistency can be confusing for users and appear unprofessional. And if you work in an organisation with multiple content contributors and no style guide, it’s inevitable. As a content professional, you’re always asking round for things like “Should I capitalise this?” or “Does this need a hyphen?” Then you might get 4 or 5 different answers depending on preference. Having a guide helps you work more efficiently, speeding up those debates and decisions, as well as reducing the risk of confusion to the users.

Do you work with a lot of stakeholders? A style guide is one of the tools that can help you all get on the same page, especially when it comes to voice and tone.

Consistency: A style guide ensures that all content produced by your organization adheres to the same standards, tone, and voice. Brand Identity: It helps maintain brand consistency by defining guidelines for language, formatting, and visual elements. Efficiency: Having predefined rules and standards saves time and effort by providing clear guidance to writers and editors.

Emphasize that a style guide is crucial for maintaining brand consistency. It's not just about using the right logo or colours but also ensuring that the tone, voice, and messaging are uniform across all mediums. This consistency helps in building a strong, recognizable brand identity. A style guide can include references to legal requirements and inclusive language to avoid unintentional offence or discrimination.

Un guide de style est crucial pour assurer la cohérence et la qualité de la communication écrite dans une entreprise. Il établit des normes pour la grammaire, le style, le formatage et l'identité visuelle, favorisant ainsi la clarté, la lisibilité et l'image de marque. En facilitant la collaboration, en réduisant les erreurs et en permettant une adaptation aux audiences spécifiques, un guide de style contribue à une communication professionnelle et efficace, économisant du temps et renfor?ant la crédibilité de l'entreprise. Son évolutivité assure la pertinence continue des normes établies.

Take it slowly with your stakeholders and teams, stopping at regular points to share research and decisions. The designers and researchers are the experts in what works and what doesn’t with users, they have the evidence that will power good decision making, but style guides can feel oppressive if relevant teams are not included in the decision making. Ensure that you have a representative group of stakeholders, including people from operations and other communications teams. Reassure them that style guides are not about what’s right or wrong, but just what you all agree works.

Involving stakeholders in decision-making is really important for your style guide adoption. For example, you can make a card sorting to help defining voice and tones. After defining them, make a table with the different aspects of each tone and propose a workshop with the stakeholders where they can create some copies for each tone.

Stress the importance of a user-centric approach in creating a style guide. Understand the users' language, cultural nuances, and accessibility needs. This makes the content more relatable and easily comprehended by the target audience. Suggest incorporating visual examples and ‘do’s and don’ts’ in the style guide. This can be particularly helpful for visual content like images and videos, showing exactly what is expected and what should be avoided.

Remember that different people use different terms to refer to the same concepts, particularly with international and global teams (e.g. full stops and periods). To make your style guide effective and accessible to everyone who needs it, you may want to name/label concepts in multiple ways. For extra clarity, I would recommend using illustrative examples for each rule, with 'good' and 'bad' sample text.

Aujourd'hui, j'utilise chatGPT pour qu'il devienne un guide de style. En lui donnant suffisamment d'informations et d'exemples stylistiques, il agit comme un référent interactif, corrige, conseil, note, suggère... C'est bien plus efficace qu'un guide PDF.

Feature user-generated content that shows your style guide. This could be blog posts, social media graphics, etc. Find the best creators in your niche and collaborate with them

Define your brand’s voice and tone with examples that showcase the personality behind your words. Use adjectives and phrases that reflect your brand’s essence. For instance, say: "Our voice is like that cool, witty friend who always knows what to say. ?? We're confident but not cocky, smart but not snobby. Imagine explaining quantum physics using memes. That's us. Always clear, never dull."

Um guia de estilo deve ser um documento flexível que se desenvolve com o tempo. Lembre-se de que, ao longo do tempo, você e sua equipe ter?o mais experiência em UX Writing. é provável que a empresa também passe por mudan?as, e, com isso, a maneira de se expressar e a identidade também mudar?o. A partir disso, novos termos relacionados à experiência do usuário podem surgir, por exemplo. Portanto, é crucial revisitar seu guia de estilo regularmente para garantir que esteja alinhado com os objetivos e princípios da empresa.

Determine an update cadence and stick with it, otherwise updates can get unruly. For example, update every quarter or every 6 months. Have a way for subject matter experts to submit requests for changes. And stay ahead of language trends yourself. Attend webinars, sign up for newsletters, and do research to make sure your guidance isn't lagging.

Keep adding research insights as you find them. It will help designers make a strong case to follow the guidance on their teams.

Think critically about the format you want to release your style guide in. For ease of governance, I'd suggest sticking to collaborative formats like HTML pages or Word or Google documents. I'd avoid PDFs. From experience, I know how time-consuming PDFs can be to update while also still maintaining a good design. PDFs are also not always a great user experience. When I first released my organization's style guide as a PDF, I received a lot of feedback from users that the search functionality was bad and produced errors.

It is not enough to merely have a content style guide. Someone has to be empowered to enforce it. A content sheriff, if you will. And that person needs to be empowered from someone high up. Because otherwise content sources in other silos, like sales or overseas offices, might not listen to them.

Flexibility: While it's important to maintain consistency, allow for flexibility in certain cases where adherence to the style guide may not be appropriate or necessary. Localization: If your content is targeted to international audiences, consider creating separate style guides for different regions or languages to accommodate cultural and linguistic differences. Evolution: Recognize that the style guide may evolve over time as your brand grows and changes. Be open to revising and refining the guidelines as needed to adapt to new circumstances.

Discuss the need for the style guide to adapt to emerging trends and technologies. For example, the rise of voice search and AI-driven content creation might necessitate updates to the style guide to remain relevant and effective.

Quizá sería interesante a?adir que puede existir la necesidad de vincular la guía de estilo al sistema de dise?o de la compa?ía y, así, crear sinergias entre los componentes y el microcopy que los acompa?a.