Words we use

A short glossary, so that we mean the same thing.

The studio's own terms, in the order a project meets them. This is a reference page, not an essay: look up the word, read the entry, go back to work.

Brief: What you send us to begin. Three sentences will do: what the company sells, who buys it, and what needs words. A brief is not a scope and does not commit either side to anything; it starts the conversation that produces one.
Brief call: The first conversation after the brief, about forty minutes by video, with both desks and whoever makes decisions on your side. We ask questions; you correct us. The weeks of a project are counted from this call.
Scope: The written agreement that a project runs on: what we will make, how many weeks it takes, who has to be in the room, what we need from you and by when, and what it costs. It does not change shape once agreed. If the brief changes, a new scope is written.
Naming: The work of finding a name for a company, a product or a service, and writing down why it is the right one. It ends in a naming document. It does not include checking whether the name can be registered — that is legal clearance, and your lawyer does it.
Longlist: Every candidate name we seriously considered, with a line on where each came from. Long on purpose: the longlist is where the bad ideas go to be seen and set aside, so that nobody suggests them again in week five.
Shortlist: The few names that passed every check. Each one comes with its reasoning written out, so that someone who was not in the room can follow how it got there.
The checks: The tests a shortlisted name has to pass: it can be said aloud, spelt after being heard once, typed into a search box without help, and it holds its meaning — or at least does no harm — in both French and English.
Proposition: The one sentence that says what the company offers and to whom. Not a slogan; a working sentence that the rest of the language is built to agree with.
Positioning line: The short line that sits under the name and tells a stranger what the company does. It is written to be true for years, not for a season, which is why it is rarely clever.
Tone of voice: How the company sounds when it writes, independent of what it is saying. It is set down as voice rules, not as adjectives, because nobody can write to an adjective.
Voice rule: A single instruction about how the company writes, with a before-and-after example from its own pages. Three or four of these make a voice guide. A good rule is one you can tell a sentence has broken.
House style: The company's settled way of writing the small things: numbers, dates, prices, units, capitalisation, how it refers to itself and to its customers. Recorded on the style sheet inside the phrase library.
Style sheet: The page or two, usually at the back of the phrase library, that holds the house style. Reference, not reading.
Phrase library: The document of reusable phrases a company's people open while they write: product names, button labels, email openings and closings, the sentence that explains the price, and the words to avoid. Kept short so that it is used.
Copy deck: The form in which rewritten pages are handed over: every page in reading order, headings marked, button labels marked, alt text written, with notes to the designer where a section should change shape. A copy deck is not a design.
Measure: In our trade, the width of a line of text — how many characters sit on it before it wraps. We mention it because the copy deck notes the measure a page is written for; a sentence written for a narrow column reads differently in a wide one.
Boilerplate: The short paragraph about the company that is reused everywhere — the foot of a press note, the end of a proposal, the about section of a listing. It is written once, carefully, and then left alone.
Microcopy: The small pieces of text inside a product or a website: button labels, form hints, error messages, empty states, confirmation lines. Individually trivial, together the most-read words a company has.
Button label: The words on a button. Written as the thing that will happen when it is pressed, in the phrase library, so that the same action has the same label on every page.
Error message: What the company says when something has gone wrong. Written in the phrase library because it is the moment a customer is least patient and most likely to remember the words.
Alt text: The written description of an image for people who cannot see it and for the software that reads pages aloud. Written as part of a page set, with the conventions kept on the style sheet.
Editorial pass: A reading of a finished text for consistency against the voice guide and the style sheet, without changing what it says. Part of every page set; also something we do on its own for a company that already holds a guide.
Glossary: This page, and the equivalent we write for a company that has its own vocabulary: the terms it uses, each with the one meaning it has decided on.
Round of changes: Your comments on a draft, sent in writing, in one batch. There is one round in every scope. A second round almost always undoes the first, so if something is still wrong after it, we talk instead.
Handover document: What arrives at the end of a project: the naming document, the voice guide, the phrase library or the copy deck, with a plain-text version alongside it and a covering note on how to use it.

A notebook lying open on a desk, its pages filled with handwriting, a pen across the fold — iiiA glossary starts as notes and ends as agreement.

The next project starts with a brief, not a meeting.

Tell us what the company does and what needs words. We reply with questions, then a written scope, and nothing starts until that scope is agreed.

Send us a brief