Brand Work line · stop 04 of 14 · 22 min · members
One template that makes every deliverable look like it came from the same studio, because it did.
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The problem
And the client receives four documents that appear to come from four different companies.
Proposals, treatments, shot lists, invoices, reports. Each one gets laid out fresh, usually under time pressure, usually by someone who wanted to be doing the actual work.
The result is inconsistency that reads as disorganisation. It also wastes real hours — laying out a document is slow, and doing it repeatedly for structurally identical documents is the definition of avoidable work.
A house style fixes both. One set of decisions, made calmly once, applied to everything afterwards without further thought.
What to fix
After these, producing a document is writing, not designing.
Write them down as values, not as impressions. 'Headings 28px, body 15px, line height 1.6' is reusable; 'clean and modern' is not.
Making it reusable
The style should be something you apply, not something you copy.
A copied template drifts — someone adjusts a heading, that version gets copied again, and six months later there are four incompatible variants.
Better is a style definition the documents import: a stylesheet, a theme file, a small script that takes content and produces the formatted document. Change the definition and every future document inherits it.
brand-kit/
pdf_style.py — fonts, scale, palette, page furniture
docx_style.js — same decisions, other format
templates/Keep the style separate from the content, in exactly the same way a brand file is kept separate from a production pipeline. It is the same principle applied to a different artefact.
Language support
A face that lacks the characters you need will fail silently and look broken.
Choose typefaces that cover every language you work in, including accented and extended characters. A face missing them will substitute glyphs from a fallback, producing letters that are visibly a different weight and shape mid-word.
This fails silently in most tools. Nothing warns you; the document simply looks slightly wrong in a way that is hard to name until someone points at a specific character.
Test it once by setting a paragraph containing every character you need, at the sizes you use. Two minutes, and it eliminates a category of embarrassment that otherwise appears in a client-facing document.
What clients notice
A document that looks systematic implies a studio behind it.
Clients cannot assess your production process. They can assess whether the four documents they have received from you look related.
When they do, the inference is that there is a system — and by extension a team, a process, and reliability. That inference is doing real work in a decision about whether to give you a larger job.
It is also cheap. The house style costs an afternoon and applies indefinitely, which makes it one of the highest-return pieces of work available to a small operation.
The restraint
Design it to be read, not to demonstrate range.
The temptation with a house style is to make it expressive. Resist it for documents whose job is information: a proposal, a shot list, a report. Generous margins, clear hierarchy, one accent used sparingly.
Save the expression for the work itself. A restrained document with excellent work inside reads as confidence; an elaborate document reads as compensation.
One useful rule: no section in a client document exists to describe your approach or philosophy. They are buying an outcome. Everything in the document should serve their decision, not your positioning.
1:1 · two hours