Too much to do, not enough hands to do it. Content needs far outnumbered the people available to design it.
Knowledge lived in people’s heads. Tone of voice, terminology and safer gambling rules weren’t written down in one usable place.
Requests arrived from everywhere: DMs, meetings, comments in Figma, often late in the process.
Ownership was unclear. Without agreed rules on who decides content, decisions could be made without content design involved at all.
Built a guidelines tool designers can actually use. Rather than another long document, I created an interactive tool organised by brand and vertical, covering voice and tone, betting terminology, CTAs, event and market naming, responsible gambling copy, and empty states and errors. Each section uses do and don’t pairs drawn from real mistakes, like promotional language creeping into product copy.
Created one home for content design. The DUX Sports Hub brings tone of voice, content principles and how we work into one place, across all three brands. I also created a wider structure for other elements of the team so it could all be found in a single place.
Gave content requests one front door. A Slack workflow captures what’s needed, when and why, so work arrives earlier and better briefed.
Defined who owns which decisions. A decision ownership framework that makes clear where content design leads, where we advise, and where we sign off.
Scaled audits with AI. I built an AI-assisted workflow to audit content across brands, turning a manual, weeks-long task into something repeatable that others can run.
Every designer in Sports now knows where to go for guidance. The guidelines and Hub are the first stop, not a content designer’s inbox.
All content requests now come through one process, and other departments that commission content have adopted it too.
Content design is brought in days, sometimes weeks, earlier than before, which means content shapes the design rather than being added to it.
The best content systems feel less like rules and more like help. Designers didn’t need another document to read. They needed answers at the moment they were writing. Building tools rather than documents, and grounding every guideline in a real mistake, made the difference between guidance people read once and guidance they actually use.
