Brand guidelines are only as good as the writing inside them.
The Dropbox Brand Guidelines had grown stale. The voice and tone content in particular had drifted from how the brand actually sounded in the world, and the guidelines site itself wasn't doing the work justice. The opportunity: a full refresh, and a new home for it.
Auditing the voice, then rebuilding it.
I started with a full audit of Dropbox's writing surfaces, from product copy to campaign work to support content, and partnered with key writing-focused teams across the company to understand where the existing guidelines were falling short. From there I refreshed the voice and tone content to reflect how Dropbox actually wrote, and how we wanted it to write going forward.
Then came the harder part: making the guidelines feel alive rather than prescriptive. Working with Brand Studio designers, we built a design system to show the voice traits in action, not just defined on a page. The goal was for a writer encountering the guidelines for the first time to leave understanding not just what the voice was, but how to use it.
To bring the whole thing to life online, we partnered with Daybreak Studio to build an entirely new brand guidelines site that showcased the craft in action.
The site won two Webby Awards in 2025.
