Brand voice examples
Almost every list of brand voice examples describes companies in adjectives, and most of them do not link the guide they are describing. Several of the URLs that do get linked have been dead for years and are still being passed around.
So this is the corpus instead: openly published guides, each fetched and dated, with the part a machine could act on pulled out. The dead ones are listed as dead, because that is the more useful half if you are keeping your own list.
It sits under brand voice guidelines, which covers the shape of the document itself, and the tool builds a filled-in one from eleven questions.
What does a published guide actually specify?
Less than you would hope, mechanically. Read a dozen of them and the pattern is consistent: pages of principles and personality, then a short section near the back with the rules anybody could actually apply.
That short section is the valuable part, and it is the part the listicles never quote. What follows is that section, per brand, with everything checked on the date given.
The corpus, with what each one specifies
| Guide | What it specifies mechanically | Notable |
|---|---|---|
| Mailchimp Content Style Guide | Grammar and mechanics in detail: capitalisation, numbers, punctuation, a word list, plus separate guidance per surface | The most complete openly published guide there is, and the only one with an explicit licence |
| GOV.UK style guide | A to Z of terms, plain-English requirements, reading age, capitalisation, numbers, dates | The most mechanically prescriptive guide in the set, and written to be applied by thousands of people |
| Monzo tone of voice | Active voice, no Latin-rooted formal words, blocklist and allowlist rather than the older pair, and permission to open a sentence with but, and, so or because | Mostly principles, and unusually specific where it does commit |
| MDN writing style guide | Spelling variant, capitalisation, terminology, code formatting | Documentation rather than brand, and all the stronger for it |
| Buffer style guide | Voice and tone principles with worked before-and-after examples | Examples carry more than the rules do |
| Intuit content design | Content principles, patterns and terminology across a design system | A design system rather than a document, which is where these are heading |
The Monzo entry is worth reading in full if you only read one, because it is honest about being a set of decisions rather than a rulebook, and because its handful of hard rules are the kind that survive contact with a model.
Which of the commonly linked guides are dead?
These are still being cited across the category. All were fetched on 17 August 2026 and none returned a working guide.
| URL that gets linked | What happens now |
|---|---|
| mailchimp.com/about/style-guide/ | 404. The guide lives at styleguide.mailchimp.com |
| atlassian.design/content/writing-style-guide | 404 |
| polaris.shopify.com/content/voice-and-tone | Redirects away to shopify.dev |
| lightningdesignsystem.com voice and tone | Redirects, no guide at the old path |
| design.firefox.com | Redirects to a different design site |
| mailerlite.com/brand-guidelines | 404 |
| ox.ac.uk style guide | 403 to anything automated |
| rnli.org | 403 to anything automated |
Two of those are worth separating. Oxford and the RNLI refuse automated clients rather than being gone, so a person with a browser may well reach them; they are listed because a link you cannot verify is a link you should not publish unchecked.
The rest are genuinely gone, and the Mailchimp one is instructive: it is probably the single most linked brand voice URL on the internet and it has been a 404 for a long time.
What do the good ones have in common?
- They separate principles from rules. The principles are for people, the rules are for anyone applying them at three in the afternoon without wanting a debate.
- They name words. A word list is the single most transferable thing in any of these guides, and the one a checker can enforce unchanged.
- They vary tone by surface rather than setting one dial for the brand. Every guide here that covers more than one channel does this.
- They show pairs. Before and after beats description, which is why the four tone questions in this tool are written paragraphs rather than sliders.
- The best of them are maintained in public. Mailchimp's is in a repository with a licence and a contribution guide, which is why it is still correct.
What none of them specify, and why it matters now
Not one of these guides says anything about being read by a machine. They were all written for people, at a time when that was the only audience, and they assume a reader who can weigh a principle against a situation.
That is the gap. A model cannot weigh anything; it needs the decision already made. So the useful exercise on any of these is the one this page does in miniature: pull out the parts that are rules, and accept that the rest is context for humans. Turning an existing guide into a file is that job at full length.
The one guide here that has been compiled into machine-readable form is Mailchimp's, and that compilation is on its own page, including the rules that could not be compiled.
When this page was last checked
Every link on this page was fetched on 17 August 2026, and the dead ones are listed rather than dropped. The plan is to re-check quarterly, because the value of a corpus is entirely in whether it still works and the last person to assemble one of these left it to rot.
If you find one that has moved since, it is worth telling us, because that is the only maintenance this page needs.
Where these come from
Every claim above is quoted from one of these, and each was read on the date beside it. If one of them has changed since, the page is wrong and we would like to know.
- Mailchimp Content Style Guide checked 2026-08-17
- GOV.UK style guide checked 2026-08-17
- Monzo: tone of voice checked 2026-08-17
- MDN: writing style guide checked 2026-08-17
- Buffer style guide checked 2026-08-17
- Intuit content design checked 2026-08-17
These guides were written for people. If you want the same decisions in a form an assistant reads, answer eleven questions and get a filled-in one.