Where this sits in the Content Factory: Process — Design Style Guide. The full system: The Content Factory.
The Design Style Guide is the standard for how everything the Content Factory makes should look: quote cards, featured images, thumbnails, pages and audits. Process turns one recording into clips, an article, quote cards, an email and ad creative. Without one look, those pieces read as a folder of one-offs. With it, they read as one brand.
Write the standard first
The first move is never to touch an asset. It’s to write the standard down. When my agents brought every audit on this site up to our current look, the orchestrator first wrote a one-file spec: the rubric, the exact styled components, the brand palette and a 20-point QA scorecard. Then the worker agents followed it line for line. They restyled and published 83 audits in one session, and refused 3 posts rather than invent data (how my agents restyled 83 audits).
Rules we learned the hard way
- Pick the layout at card one, before the batch. Same width, same chrome, every card. That’s what makes a set read as a wall (how we turned my positive mentions into cards).
- Nothing covers the face. We stack the photo in its own band and put the quote underneath instead of laying words over it.
- Budget for faces, not quotes. A great quote with the wrong face, or a 95-pixel photo, means you hold the card.
- Real photos of real people beat diagrams and stock art wherever the piece needs an image.
- Know the default sizes. A featured image is 1600 pixels wide by 1232 tall (how to create a web page for pillar content).
- Every button stands out from what it sits on, on white, on a photo and on a dark footer, not only on hover.
Where it connects
The Design Style Guide feeds every Post-stage channel: YouTube, your company website and social channels. The writing side of the same standard is in the blog posting guidelines.
Part of: The Content Factory · Process stage