Case Studies Case Studies

Case Study: SpecialGuest

How I helped communications and art company SpecialGuest by doing a substantive website edit

Situation

In May 2023, a colleague I had edited for at The Atlantic and then at Cove emailed me from a new company, SpecialGuest, to ask if I would do a full copy edit of the agency’s website.

SpecialGuest, co-founded by Aaron Duffy, whose name you might know from his work on OK Go’s viral music video “The Writing’s on the Wall,” helps “the world’s most influential brands” create “communications as innovative as their products.”

By chatting via email with other staff members at SpecialGuest, I learned that the agency was balancing quite a few projects and wasn’t ready to dive into a website copy edit quite yet. I checked in a month later, then again almost one year later.

This time, SpecialGuest was ready! The project manager scheduled a virtual video chat with Aaron Duffy and one of the agency’s designers, during which we hashed out the goals and details of the project.

SpecialGuest didn’t want just a copy edit to remove errors, it wanted consistent, simplified, optimized language from the Home, About, and Contact pages to the Our Clients page and case studies, to bring the copy up to date with what is true for the agency now. In other words, it wanted a substantive edit.

Over the next two weeks, I created a proposal and project estimate, finalized the contract with the agency, and received the 50 percent deposit.

Task

SpecialGuest needed to update the case studies featured on its Our Clients page. While the Home page reflected the agency’s current voice, tone, and brand, the case studies, published as long ago as 2015, did not.

“We’re not always speaking the same language project to project,” Duffy said.

Scope of the project

In addition to the substantive edit, I would user-test the website—noting formatting or design that didn’t make sense, repeat images, fuzzy images, etc.—and build an editorial style guide for the agency.

SpecialGuest wanted the project completed by early May 2024, when a forthcoming launch would result in many eyes on the website.

Action

SpecialGuest provided me with a spreadsheet an intern had built to audit the website and note suggested fixes. It also shared its pitch deck for clients as an additional reference for how the agency talks about itself.

Over a week, I copy-pasted SpecialGuest’s web copy into a Google Doc, where I tracked my changes and left comments with larger questions or requests for additional information. This would allow edits to be a discussion: If SpecialGuest wanted to push back on or talk about an edit, it could.

Once the edits were finalized, I entered the changes into SpecialGuest’s content management system.

SpecialGuest did not have an existing style guide, so during the edit, I noted obvious style preferences shown on the website and collected and organized them in a Google Doc.

I also:

  • Reviewed all case studies to determine a consistent structure, based on the agency’s existing structure, and reorganized the content to suit that structure;

  • Trimmed or lengthened the case studies so they were roughly the same word count;

  • Watched every video on the case-study webpages to pull more details about each project;

  • Made sure each case study addressed the ethos of the Home page;

  • Copyedited and user-tested the entire website; and

  • Left comments asking for clarification or additional information.

SpecialGuest reviewed the changes and responded to comments.

Result

In a month, I performed a substantive edit of four website pages and 33 case studies, helping SpecialGuest to present a unified front that powerfully conveyed the pioneering work it had produced for clients.

Besides noting style preferences, the editorial style guide I created for SpecialGuest included a case-study template to help the agency sustain consistency as it published more case studies.

Want to see the finished product for yourself? Check out the website and its case studies here.

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Hi, I’m Jaime, editor and owner of Pristine Editing LLC. To get to know me better, and for more editing tips, sign up for my quarterly email newsletter! You can also follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram. And don’t miss out on my free style guide template.

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