Content guidelines for Cryptlex

As a Product Team of One at Cryptlex, I took it upon myself to have more structure in our content and I set to out to look for ideas and resources on how we could do things better.

A brand is always answering two questions. The first one internally facing: What do we believe? The second, externally: How do we behave? You must remain authentic to yourself, your core values, and what you stand for. If you’re not, people will sniff you out. But your brand must maintain cultural congruence — remaining relevant to the times, always evolving to inspire people at large. The answers to these two curiosities must always be aligned. – Brian Collins

I have been planning and documenting ways to expand the content at Cryptlex, one of which is a gradual refactor of the documentation using the Diátaxis framework. To start out, I started drawing out the voice guidelines using the NNGroup’s Tone of Voice framework.

Tone of Voice

After some deliberation and discussion with the team, we decided on Serious, Formal, Respectful, and Matter of fact dimensions for the content.

While I was intrigued with having a brand that is allowed to be humorous, I was also concerned about the potential for misinterpretation. I decided that we should stick to the Serious tone of voice since humor is subjective and is very contextual. The ‘license to chill’ example may not be understood by all audiences and is exclusive to a certain demographic.

Resources

I had been ironing out mistakes we had made in the past with our content and wrote a few guidelines for how to approach content creation, but I felt like it was incomplete and that I did not know enough about content creation to further contribute meaningfully to the guidelines. Thankfully, while scouring the internet and forums written by technical writers, I stumbled upon the following resources:

1. Tiny Content Framework
2. Content at Intuit
3. Atlassian Design System
4. Gitlab Pajamas