Objective

When I joined PC Financial, I noticed inconsistencies in our product content, grammar, punctuation, tone, and style varied across different touchpoints. This led to a fragmented user experience and confusion around our brand voice

My goal was to create a unifying content style guide to establish consistency and improve clarity, accessibility, and brand trust across the banking experience.

My roles and responsibility

Role: Sole Content Designer, Banking Experience
Collaborators: Design, Product, Legal, Marketing

What I did

  • Audited exisitng content
  • Mapped common pattern
  • Research industry standards
  • Define voice and tone principles
  • Drafted the style guide
  • Collaborated with stakeholders

Audited Existing Content

I started by reviewing existing copy across the PC Financial digital banking experience, including web and mobile platforms.

The goal was to:

  • Identify inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation, tone, grammar, and formatting.
  • Identify unclear or outdated content patterns.
  • Understand how our current messaging aligns, or doesn’t, with our brand values.

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This audit helped create a foundation for what needed to change and which decisions would provide the most impact.

Mapped Common Patterns

After the audit, I categorized repeated language patterns, both strong and problematic. This included:

  • Frequently used terms (e.g., account, balance, statement) and how they were being presented.
  • Content structures like lists, buttons, tooltips, and error messages.
  • Sentence construction styles (e.g., passive vs. active voice, long vs. short sentences).
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This step helped uncover where guidance was most urgently needed and informed the prioritization of topics within the guide.

Researched Industry Standards

To ensure we aligned with best practices, I reviewed style guides from other financial institutions, tech companies, and editorial resources. This helped:

 

  • Validate decisions (e.g., using contractions for a more conversational tone).
  • Support recommendations with widely accepted conventions.
  • Ensure accessibility and inclusive language were baked into the foundation.

Define Voice &Tone Principles

Rather than reinvent the brand’s identity, I translated high-level brand language into actionable writing guidelines for digital products. This involved:

  • Creating a “voice snapshot” to capture how we want to sound at a glance.
  • Building tone scenarios based on user emotional states (e.g., frustrated, curious, uncertain).
  • Offering examples of how our tone should adapt in different contexts, like onboarding vs. error states.

This ensures writers can adapt the voice while still sounding consistent.

Drafted theStyle Guide

I developed specific guidance for grammar, formatting, and style decisions relevant to the PC Financial experience.

This included:

  • Sentence case vs. title case
  • Number formatting (e.g., “one to nine” spelt out, 10+ as numerals)
  • Consistent date and time formats
  • Inclusive and plain language principles

These rules helped eliminate subjective decisions and increase consistency.

Collaborated with Stakeholders

Throughout the process, I worked closely with:

  • Designers and product managers need to understand how the guide would integrate with UI design.
  • Legal and compliance teams to ensure regulated terms were respected.
  • Marketing and brand teams to align the tone with existing messaging across channels.

Feedback was regularly gathered to make sure the guide was practical, usable, and relevant.

Summary Of the Guide

The content style guide is a practical, easy-to-use resource that helps teams write clearly, consistently, and with intention. It goes beyond grammar rules, it shows how to write with the ideal voice, adapt tone to different situations, and create content that’s inclusive, accessible, and human. I included before-and-after examples, voice and tone guidance, and writing basics like punctuation, formatting, and case usage. There are also tips for avoiding jargon, writing in plain language, and thinking from the user’s perspective.

​Created in close collaboration with product, design, legal, and marketing, the guide aligns teams around a shared voice and ensures consistency in how we communicate across platforms.

Impact & Results

The style guide quickly became more than just a reference, it turned into a foundational tool for how we communicate across the product, and cross-functional teammates (like designers and PMs) began using it to guide early content decisions.

​There was a noticeable improvement

  • Content reviews became faster and more collaborative, thanks to the before-and-after examples.
  • Teams started speaking with one voice across different touchpoints
  • Even our legal and compliance teams leaned on the guide to align on tone in sensitive moments.

Most importantly, the guide helped embed content thinking earlier in the product development process. It created clarity, reduced back-and-forth, and gave everyone a shared foundation for writing with intention.

View Content Style Guide