IDEA LAB · 2026

Brand Voice Engine

A portfolio that doubles as a working brand-voice product, built so anyone on a team can write in-brand without me in the room.

Role
Solo · design, system, and build
Year
2026
Stack
Cursor · Claude · Vercel · Next.js

THE STORY

I made my portfolio the product.

Instead of a static case-study site, I built this as a working brand-voice engine. The same tokens, voice rules, and components that render these pages also power an audit tool that scores copy against a brand. The portfolio isn't describing the work. It is the work, running live.

THE MOTIVATION

Brand voice dies in the handoff.

Voice guidelines live in PDFs nobody opens. The moment a new writer joins or a deadline hits, the brand drifts. I wanted to know whether an agentic system could hold a voice the way a design system holds spacing: portable, enforceable, and usable by someone who has never met the brand's author.

THE LEARNINGS

Voice is a constraint file.

  • Designing in code closed the loop. Owning tokens, type, and motion in one Next.js codebase meant the old 'spec vs. build' argument simply disappeared.
  • Agentic tools are fast, but taste is the bottleneck. Cursor and Claude generate options in seconds. The value I add is knowing which option is right, and why.
  • A voice is mostly constraints. The engine only got good once I wrote down what the brand never says, and what it does.

WHAT I'D DO DIFFERENTLY

Next time, smaller and meaner.

  • Ship the scoring engine before the showcase. I polished the portfolio shell first, but the audit tool is the genuinely novel part and deserved to lead.
  • Write the evals first. I tuned voice by feel for too long before building a test set of good and bad copy to measure against.
  • Treat 'coming soon' as a promise with a date. Open loops only build trust if they actually close.
Visit the live site
Paul Banks

Charlotte, NC · Remote

Paul Banks

Principal Product Designer

After 16+ years shipping product interfaces, I now design the surfaces where people and agents share a task: prompts, confidence, and the checkpoint where a human still decides.

Get in touchDownload resumeSee my brand-voice work →