I was working on a style sheet last night and thought I’d share a few basic tips for anyone creating a similar document.

Creating a ‘house style’ for your business, magazine or agency is an important way to ensure consistency across your brand, make it easier for your readers to digest your content, and sets your baseline for editorial quality.

At the end of the day, happy readers are happy customers, and happy customers are repeat customers! Win-win!

When creating a style sheet, keep it organised and include grammar and spellings, as well as setting out your tone of voice and mapping out how you credit and caption images.

Creating a style sheet is an exciting process and the end result is useful for training new team members as well as being a reference guide for your existing team. I feel like I check one of my magazine’s style sheet every time I’m copyediting or proofing it and I’ve worked on the publication for 20 years…!!

This is because style sheets evolve. Don’t be afraid to switch up your house style if you decide you prefer one grammar rule over another. You can change your mind about elisions, hyphenation and whether to leave a space either side of an ellipsis. It’s ok.

The point is to make sure everyone is singing from the same song sheet. Sorry, style sheet.

I’ll go in to much more detail on style guides in a forthcoming blog post but, until then, give me a follow on Instagram for more useful tips!