Why a brand voice guide should fit on one page

Brand voice guides usually exist in one of two states: they do not exist at all, or they run to forty pages and nobody opens them. The outcome is the same in both cases — everyone writes in their own voice.

The guide's job is to make decisions, not descriptions

"Friendly but professional" says nothing; every brand writes that. A guide that works is one that does not leave the writer in doubt. To get there, use comparisons instead of abstract adjectives:

• We say: "Let's plan what you'll publish this month together."
• We don't say: "Let's optimise your social media processes."

Three to five pairs like this do more work than a forty-page manual.

Draw three boundaries

To fit on one page, these are enough:

• Tone: Two adjectives, each with an example sentence. More than that cancels itself out.
• Prohibitions: Words and phrases the brand never uses. A list of prohibitions teaches faster than a list of descriptions.
• Formatting rules: Form of address, emoji use, headline length, punctuation preferences.

Finish with examples

Let the last section of the guide show the same message across three channels: a social post, an e-mail opening, an ad headline. If someone joining the team can start writing by looking at those three examples, the guide is doing its job.

Keep it a living document

A voice guide is not a document you write once and file away. Once a month, add two examples that turned out well from published content. Six months later you have a reference drawn from the brand's own archive, rather than a theoretical manual.