(Image: Nick’s book “flatplan”)
With a month to go until manuscript submission, 26er Nick Carson shares some of the process behind writing his upcoming coffee-table book, How Brands Find Their Voice…
In December 2025, an editor at US publisher Rockport got in touch. He’d found me through the Brand Impact Awards, the scheme I founded. He asked if I was working on any book ideas; I sent him a rough outline – let’s give verbal identity the in-depth ‘design book’ treatment its visual counterpart has long enjoyed.
What happened next is the part nobody tells you about. January went on gathering testimonials, to-ing and fro-ing about how we could use my network to market it, and – the real hurdle – selling it internally to his colleagues. Not just the subject, but the premise: that verbal identity could be presented visually.
Studio bookshelves are stacked with beautiful books documenting how brands look. The shelf about how they sound is a lot thinner, and its foundations were laid a quarter of a century ago by 26’s very own John Simmons: We, Me, Them & It and The Invisible Grail. Thanks to our relationship through 26, I’m delighted that John has kindly written the foreword to mine.
The argument that convinced the publisher: verbal and visual are flipsides of the same coin. We’d look at the craft and strategic rigour of the process, but show the output in situ – campaigns, packaging, physical environments and more.
The contract came through in March, followed by several weeks developing a more detailed chapter structure, a skeletal flatplan, and a global wishlist of writers, agencies and brands at the very top of the brand voice game. Outreach began in mid-April, with the first interview towards the end of that month.
That was four months ago. One more month to go. Here’s what happened in between.
A multitude of voices, not just my own
I started with a clear idea of what the book wasn’t. My background is in editorial – I edited design magazines for the best part of 15 years – but in a poacher-turned-gamekeeper twist, I’ve been a freelance brand writer since 2018. This was never intended as a 200-page argument for my own methodology, though. My practice shapes the structure and the focus, but my work gets one ‘about the author’ spread at the back.
I made the call early on that desk research wouldn’t cut it. Every case study must be sourced from an interview. If a brand goes quiet, I don’t quietly write it up based on material that’s publicly available.
In an interview, you can dig deeper. All too often, the verbal side of a branding project gets a line in the design press, a paragraph at best. This was my chance to make it the star. To ask about challenges, failures, processes, decisions and client dynamics that don’t normally make the cut.
Interviews and structure: a symbiotic relationship
Before I wrote a word, I began setting up blocks of interviews. The vast majority took place from May to early July, averaging 45min each, sometimes as many as six in a day.
Initial outreach was based on my wishlist, and an early draft of the structure. In some cases, a contributor’s inclusion was a simple round peg in a round hole on the flatplan. In others, conversations about the best projects to include, and opinions shared, led to recasting decisions on the fly.
Laying the foundations…
Since the beginning, there have been four sections as the backbone of the book. ‘Backstory’ explores the evolution of the discipline; the origins and influence of brands such as Virgin, Ben & Jerry’s, Innocent, Mailchimp, Monzo, Oatly and Liquid Death.
Two case-study-led sections provide the substance: ‘Heroes’ digs deep into the process of creating world-class verbal identities; ‘Plotlines’ explores voice through six distinctive styles, from provocateurs to plain-speakers.
Finally, ‘Continuity’ asks the question that matters most: how does it all stick in the years that follow, as part of the brand’s in-house culture and written output?
I wanted opinion in there too – spreads called ‘Perspectives’ – plus guest-edited ‘Cameos’, where I hand the mic to brand voice experts Nick Parker, Vikki Ross, Carissa Justice and David Levin to discuss their favourite examples.
…and letting them shift
The pagination, structure and content of these core sections has been in constant flux. Back in May, I’d listed 25 brands to approach for Plotlines, split across six chapters. Today, just seven from that original list are in there. A handful have moved to other sections. Some ghosted me or dropped out later. The bulk are new – and some of them I’d never heard of before starting the process.
My earliest plan collected all the Perspectives together in a dedicated opinion section. As the Plotlines took shape, it became clear that they worked much better as arguments to play off each archetype. The six writers – Eli Altman, Jane Duru, Nick Asbury, Cat Wall, Thomas Sharp and Mat Groom – have provided insights that work much better as contextual commentary.
Continuity has been restructured and expanded most of all. Early drafts featured a section of around 25 pages; it’s now twice the size, drawing on 20 different interviews about training methods, best-practice guidelines, the writing culture within both brands and agencies, and an extensive chapter on overcoming the threats to a brand voice.
Spending words by the page, not the chapter
By the end of July, the flatplan had begun to solidify and writing could begin in earnest. Then it became an issue of word budget.
Across 208 pages, 40,000 words was the ceiling set by the publisher. In a book like this you don’t spend it by chapter: you spend it by page unit. I settled on 250 words for a single-page case study, 400 for a double-spread. Longer stories, like Heroes, have fewer words per page to let the imagery breathe. Continuity is denser, to get a more complex, multi-voice argument across.
Those rates, too, have been in constant flux as I get deeper into the writing, and grapple with the balance between the richness of the stories I have to tell, and the quality of the visual assets that could carry it.
Death by a thousand paper cuts
Another monstrous hurdle for a multi-contributor book that relies on supplied artwork: permission to print it. A form granting non-exclusive worldwide publication rights had to go to every contributor.
The agency’s initial enthusiasm often counted for nothing once the uphill struggle to get the brand to sign began. Several previously locked-in case studies fell at this hurdle, when it became clear that a large holding company needed to sign, and the complexity of the process wasn’t worth pursuing.
The lesson, learned from bitter experience? Ask who signs, and how long it’ll take, at first contact rather than post-interview.
Where it all stands today
With a mountain of raw transcripts that utterly dwarfs the 40,000-word cap, my AI assistant Claude has been a godsend to keep the process manageable. Set to private, of course – so all the raw content stays within the confines of the project – it provides a smart repository for the 70 transcripts.
Like a production assistant to extend my brain, Claude helps me maintain my detailed, ever-evolving casting matrix for different sections, as well as keeping tally of cross-referenced arguments and counterarguments so I can better plan who and what goes where, and why. Of course, AI being AI, everything must be painstakingly checked and referenced before I write anything.
I’m now well past the 25,000-word mark, with most of the remaining unwritten material sitting in banked interviews. Plenty of case studies still to write, but a flatplan that’s been shifting constantly beneath my feet for months is locked down at last.
Besides the foreword from John, I’m delighted to have several more 26ers contributing to the book – including 26 co-founder Tim Rich, who anchors the section on threats to a voice, and Board member Elise Valmorbida, who tells the story of her beautiful writing for Dishoom.
My final manuscript is due at the end of September. How Brands Find Their Voice is due to be published in Spring 2027. Wish me luck!