Voice is most of what people experience
People spend far more time reading an organization than looking at its logo: the homepage, the error message, the reply to a complaint. When the voice is consistent, very different materials feel like one organization. When it isn’t, the organization sounds like several, none of them distinctive.
Brand guidelines often describe voice with three adjectives, such as “friendly, confident, human,” and leave writers to guess what that means on a Tuesday afternoon.
What a working voice includes
A usable voice is specific enough to change what gets written. We usually define:
- Point of view: what the organization believes and is willing to say.
- Verbal moves: how the voice opens, explains, delivers bad news and uses humour (or doesn’t).
- Boldness and contrast: how far the voice pushes, with before-and-after examples against how the organization sounds today.
- Register: how it shifts between a funder and a first-time visitor, or a campaign headline and a policy page.
- Vocabulary and mechanics: preferred terms, words to avoid, and the spelling and punctuation rules that make writing look like one organization wrote it.
Voice for AI tools
Much of what organizations publish now starts as an AI draft. Without guidance, those drafts sound like every other AI draft: inflated claims, tidy groups of three, familiar stock phrases.
So we write voice guidance for people and for models: clear rules, real examples of good and bad writing, and, where a team uses tools like Claude, a custom skill that applies the voice automatically.
Naming
A name is the most compressed piece of verbal identity, and one of the hardest to change later. We name products, programs, platforms and campaigns:
- Criteria first: who it’s for, what it should suggest, how it sits beside existing names, where it has to work and what it must avoid.
- Generate widely: hundreds of candidates, descriptive, suggestive, invented and borrowed, before anyone falls for one.
- Narrow with evidence: meaning in other languages, how it sounds aloud, domain and handle availability, and obvious conflicts in the market. Formal trademark clearance is a legal step, done with your counsel.
- Test in use: the shortlist on real screens, signs and sentences, where names that looked strong on a list often feel different.
Sometimes a plain, descriptive name is right, because people need to understand the thing immediately.
Naming systems
Naming problems often span a whole portfolio of names collected from different eras and teams. A naming system sets the rules for when something gets its own name, when it gets a descriptive label, and how names relate to the parent brand.
Alongside the thing it names
We don’t sell standalone naming or voice projects. Both are strongest made alongside the site, product or campaign they’ll live in. If you only need a name, a specialist naming firm will serve you better.
What you receive
- A voice guide, with before-and-after rewrites of real materials
- A custom skill or AI instructions that apply the voice, where the team uses AI tools
- A checked shortlist of names, tested in real applications, and a naming system where the portfolio needs one