Style guide

Introduction.

A brand isn’t just a logo, a website, or an ad. A brand is an experience. And we want that experience to look good, sound good, and be memorable. The Material Bank Style Guide provides copy guidelines for our site, marketing materials, and editorial copy. Writers, editors, and developers can now use this as a guide for our overall writing style, copy usage, and product language. In short:

Our voice.

Confident

We dream big and deliver bigger. As leaders in our space, we speak with ambition and authority. We inspire with energy and enthusiasm, but keep it grounded in reality. We’re bold, but not arrogant. We’re action-oriented, and always back up our claims with concrete examples.

Definitive

We’re here to make things happen. We speak simply, with courage and conviction. We make complex ideas intuitive and technical knowledge easy to understand. We hone our messages down to the core — never robotic — and keep things light when the time is right.

Authentic

We never forget that we’re powered by real people. Though our operations span the globe, we don’t sound formal or bureaucratic — we keep it conversational and warm. We aren't just a service provider, we're facilitators and connectors. We personalize without being cutesy and balance our professionalism with empathy.

Tone and audience.

Material Bank has a tone that is part informative and part conversational — but our goal is to always be clear and understood. When we’re writing, we consider the reader’s state of mind, where they are in their journey, and what they expect from us. Once we have an idea of what we’re communicating, where, and to whom, we adjust our tone accordingly.

Capitalization.

Keep it simple. Keep it consistent. Default to sentence case headlines and copy for our logged-out site and all external comms.

For example:

Also, default to sentence case for the logged-in version of the site.

These, however, are okay:

Punctuation.

We punctuate with purpose. Our punctuation rules are unique but intentional.

These, however, are okay:

We use the Oxford comma. No ifs, ands, or buts.

Numbers, dates, and times.

We’re global, but keep things simple.

Special use cases.

Words, phrases, and definitions to keep in mind. We capitalize a handful of branded phrases.

We capitalize a handful of branded phrases.

We use boilerplate terms a bit differently.

Some info about our community.

Some more info about our community.

Copy to avoid.

There are some things we just don’t say. Please refrain from including these in your writing:

For some internal document and section titles, default to AP style for headlines and do not punctuate.

For example: