Four pieces of work, described as what arrives at the end.

IA naming document

What arrives is a document holding the longlist we considered, the shortlist we recommend, and the reasoning that took us from one to the other. It is written to be read by someone who was not in the room, because the person who signs off a name often was not.

What it is made of

• The brief, restated in our words, so you can see that we heard you before we started.
• A longlist of candidate names, each with a line on where it came from and what it is doing.
• A shortlist of the names that passed every check, with the reasoning for each one written out.
• For every shortlisted name: how it sounds said aloud, how it is spelt after being heard once, what it means or suggests in French and in English, and how it sits beside the names of the companies you compete with.
• A note on the checks we did not do. Whether a name can be registered as a trade mark is a question for your lawyer, and we say so on the first page.

How long it runs

Four to six weeks. The longlist takes the first fortnight; the checks and the reasoning take the rest.

Who has to be in the room

One decision-maker and, ideally, one person who talks to customers every day. A naming project with a committee behind it tends to end with a compromise nobody wanted.

IIA voice guide

What arrives is a short document — usually well under twenty pages — that says how the company sounds and then shows it. It is meant to be read in a morning and kept open afterwards.

What it is made of

• Three or four voice rules, each written as an instruction a colleague can follow, not as an adjective.
• For every rule, a before-and-after pair taken from your own pages or emails. We do not invent the bad example; we find it.
• A page on what the voice is not, because the fastest way to hold a voice is to know what it refuses.
• A one-page version for the wall, or for the top of the shared drive.

How long it runs

Three to four weeks.

Who has to be in the room

Whoever writes most for the company — often not the person who commissioned the guide. If the emails are written by two people in the back office, we want those two.

IIIA phrase library

What arrives is a reference document your people open while they write. It settles the small decisions that otherwise get made differently by everyone, every day.

What it is made of

• Product and service names, with the one spelling and the one capitalisation the company uses.
• Button labels and the microcopy around forms, error messages and empty states.
• Email openings and closings for the situations that come up most: a quote, a delay, a thank-you, a no.
• The sentence that explains the price, and the one that explains why it changed.
• The words to avoid, each with what to say instead.
• A style sheet settling numbers, dates, prices, units, how the company refers to itself, and how alt text is written.

How long it runs

Three to five weeks; longer when it is built alongside a voice guide, because the two feed each other.

Who has to be in the room

The person who answers customer email, and whoever owns the website.

IVA rewritten page set

What arrives is a copy deck: every page rewritten in the order it is read, with the headings marked, the button labels marked, the alt text written, and notes to the designer where a section should change shape.

What it is made of

• The home page.
• The page that sells — the product, the service or the offer, whichever one the company lives on.
• The page that explains the price, which is usually the page that was written last and in a hurry.
• The small pages nobody writes carefully: the contact page, the thank-you page, the error page. They ride along.

How long it runs

Four to six weeks for the main pages, including one round of changes.

Who has to be in the room

Your designer, from the first week, so the deck lands on a layout that exists rather than one we imagined.

Most projects combine two of these.

A naming document is usually followed by a voice guide, because a new name needs a way of speaking to go with it. A phrase library is best built at the same time as a page set, so that every phrase has been used at least once before it is written down as the standard. We suggest the pairing in the scope; you decide, and the weeks are added up honestly rather than overlapped.

What we do not combine: any of the four with media buying, ad-account work, search retainers, logo design, a press office or social posting. Those are other people's trades, and we will happily hand them the words.

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