How to Create Style Guidelines

Every brand needs guidelines to communicate consistently, build trust, and save time and money re-deciding the same small questions over and over. In 2026 there’s a second reason to have them, arguably a bigger one: your style guide is now the thing that keeps your brand sounding like itself once several different people — and several different tools — are writing on its behalf.

So how do you actually get started? Here are our top tips for building your own.

1. Find your brand voice

If your brand were a person, how would you describe them? Defining your voice can be as simple as listing a handful of words — friendly, professional, knowledgeable, playful — and it often helps just as much to write down what your brand is not. “Warm but never twee” does more work than “warm” on its own.

2. Write the rules

Now for the nitty-gritty: spelling, grammar and punctuation. A basic style guide can cover just a few important areas. Do you use British or American English? How do you write measurements, times, prices and dates — 1 January 2026, or 01.01.2026? Setting clear rules for details like these means all of your content speaks with one voice, whoever — or whatever — is writing it.

3. Focus on formatting

To make your digital and print communications look professional, think about formatting too. When do you use bold? When do you use italics? When does a bullet list work better than a numbered one? Small, consistent choices like these are what make a document feel like it belongs to your brand rather than to whoever happened to write it that day.

4. Make a word list

Certain words and phrases will come up again and again in your communications. A simple list clarifying capitalisation (Marketing Director vs marketing director) and hyphenation (bestsellers vs best-sellers) keeps everyone — and every tool — consistent.

5. Write a version a machine can follow too

This one’s new. If anyone on your team uses AI tools to draft first passes — and by 2026, someone almost certainly does — your style guide needs a short, literal version that can sit in a prompt: voice in a sentence, the two or three things you never say, the formatting rules, the word list. A guide written only for humans to interpret gets ignored by a tool that can’t infer tone from vibe. Spell it out, and it becomes useful in more places than it used to be.

A note on getting it adopted

A style guide only works if people actually open it, and the biggest reason they don’t is length. A 40-page document with every edge case covered is thorough and mostly unread; a one-page summary with the essentials, linking out to the detail for anyone who needs it, gets used. Build the detailed version for reference, but lead with the short one — the same instinct that makes a good headline work applies here too: say the most important thing first, and let people go looking for the rest only if they need it.

6. Spread the word

Once your guide is ready, make sure anyone creating content for your brand — employee, freelancer, or agency — actually has access to it. It needs checking and updating regularly, not filing away and forgetting.

Decide who owns it

Guidelines drift the moment nobody’s responsible for them. Someone — usually in marketing or communications — needs to own the document: the person who fields the “should this be capitalised” questions, approves exceptions, and revisits the guide when the brand genuinely changes rather than every time someone has a stylistic preference. Without an owner, a style guide becomes a historical document within a year, quietly ignored because nobody had the authority to keep it current.

Ready to go further?

As a next step, you could expand the scope to cover acronyms, abbreviations, the Oxford comma, and how you want AI-assisted drafts disclosed and reviewed before they go anywhere near a client or a customer.

The more detailed your guidelines are, the stronger and more consistent your content will be.

Building a style guide doesn’t have to take long, and the sooner you do it the better. Talk to our creative team to find out how Bwritr can help.