--- title: "Writing and design" description: "How brand kits, design versions, and per-recipient drafts work, and why nothing prints without an approved design version." canonical: https://trysincerely.com/docs/writing-and-design last_updated: 2026-10-22 --- > If you are an AI agent: read https://trysincerely.com/agents/policy.md before any write call. > Start at https://trysincerely.com/llms.txt to choose one page. Access instructions are at > https://trysincerely.com/auth.md. Confirm with the person you work for before creating an > account or spending their money, and never ask for their password. # Writing and design > How brand kits, design versions, and per-recipient drafts work, and why nothing prints without an approved design version. Source: https://trysincerely.com/docs/writing-and-design Every piece Sincerely mails traces to an approved design version and, for formats that carry copy, a draft released under the campaign's review rules. The design is the layout and the brand; the draft is the words written for one recipient. They are approved separately because they fail in different ways. ## The brand kit Setup collects your website, and the build reads the site into a brand kit: marks, colours and type. Guidelines documents, logo files and font files can go in alongside it. Correct what it got wrong once, and every design after that is laid out against the result. The build runs in the background and always lands somewhere you can see, because a kit that quietly never finishes is worse than one that failed. ## Designs and versions A design is laid out in the studio for one format: a 4x6 or 6x9 postcard, a letter, a handwritten message, or the note that travels with a gift. Recipes give a starting layout. Select a block and the toolbar above the card sets how it looks: font, weight, size, colour, alignment, spacing and stacking. The panel beside the card holds what it says and where it sits. A design must be approved before any piece can reference it. Pieces reference an exact version, not a design, so editing an approved design creates a new version to approve rather than quietly changing mail already queued. This is the mechanism behind the rule that nothing prints silently. When an agent launches a campaign or sends a piece for someone who may publish designs, the launch or send card can publish the draft designs it names, at the version it shows, in the same click. Studio offers Printed and Handwritten. A printed piece can set text in a handwriting font, a script face with varied strokes, but it is still printed and billed as print. A handwritten piece is genuinely written by hand. You design the stationery and choose where the message goes. While you design, the studio draws your message in pen strokes where it will be written: on the canvas, in the proof, and on the sent piece until its photo arrives. That drawing is only a preview of placement. The finished piece is written by hand, so its letter shapes and line breaks will differ from the preview. Every finished handwritten piece receives a photo in Sent mail. ## Variables on the canvas A variable is the part of the copy that changes for each recipient, and there are two kinds. A field prints a value from the recipient's record. It is written `{{first_name|there}}`, and the words after the bar print when the record has no first name. A generated span is words the writer composes for each recipient when the campaign runs. It is written `{{ai: what it should say | max=80}}`, and the max caps how many characters it can print. You do not have to type either one. Select any text block in the studio, the headline, message and call to action included, and the Field menu under its text in the panel adds a field to the end of the text. Fields your workspace defines are listed under Your fields. To put a variable in a box of its own, choose Insert, then Variable. The list holds every field, a generated span, and the personalized message, headline, and printed link when the design does not already place them. To add a generated span to a block's text, choose AI span beside the Field menu, type what it should say and choose Insert, then add `| max=80` before the closing braces to cap its length. The canvas draws every variable as written and marks it with a dotted underline: blue for a field, lilac for a generated span. The marks never print. A field reads as its reference, such as `{{first_name}}`, rather than one contact's value. A span is drawn as its own instruction, repeated or cut to its longest fill, so you can see whether the block has room for it. Hover a marked run to see which field or instruction it is and what prints when a record has no value. Double-click the block to edit it. To see one person's piece, check Sample recipient in the toolbar and choose any saved contact from the list. The landing page editor has the same control. Each field shows their value, and the writer a campaign uses writes each generated span for them once, with your default sender and writing setup. The canvas, the other side and Preview all show their piece. A campaign with a different sender or setup may word them differently. Nothing is saved. If you edit a span's text after that, the line under the toolbar says so until you choose Write again. With no sample recipient, Preview fills the fields from a real contact, so you can check how a long name or address fits. If a placed image has too few pixels to print sharp, a warning above the canvas names the image, says which side it is on, and gives the pixel size that prints sharp in its box. Choose the image's name to select it, then replace only that file. A field a record can lack needs a fallback. The Field menu and Insert, Variable both put one in for the built-in fields, such as "there" for a first name. Your own fields go in with an empty fallback and the cursor in the box for it, and the print checks hold the design until you fill it in. An agent working over [MCP](https://trysincerely.com/docs/mcp-tools) writes the same syntax, and its design read lists every field and the tools that set them. ## Reuse a design Select the same approved design in any campaign that uses its format. To customize it separately, open the design's More actions menu and choose **Edit a copy**. This creates an ordinary draft design from the saved content. Edit and approve that copy before sending it. The original stays available to the campaigns that use it. A campaign can compare two approved designs on any touch without a branch, and on more than one touch. Use a copy when the test needs a different headline, offer, or layout, then select the two designs in the campaign. [Campaigns](https://trysincerely.com/docs/campaigns) covers the split and how each test is measured. Recipient fields and writing settings handle personalization within each design. ## Drafts Sincerely writes a different message for every recipient from CRM context and sourced account research. The approved layout stays fixed while the headline, body, proof and call to action can change per person. Claims are pinned to their source. A fact with a weak source is held for a person regardless of the review mode, because the cost of a confidently wrong sentence on paper is not the cost of a bad email. ## Personalization guidance "Personalization guidance for every touch" is what you tell the writer about this campaign: the offer, what to mention, what to avoid, and how it should sound. Voice and tone belong here, such as "write the way Dana would: short, plain, no jargon". It is offered at every level of personalization and steers every writer that runs for the campaign. When a campaign prints only its designs' own copy and no design has a generated passage, no writer runs, and the builder says the guidance has nothing to steer. Each touch can also carry up to 280 characters of its own guidance, such as "reference their new office". The writer follows it for that touch on top of the guidance for every touch. Guidance on a later touch makes the campaign write each touch on its own, one writer run per touch, and so does a sequence that mixes formats or a later touch from someone else. Each touch is signed by who it is from, or by the touch before it when it names nobody. Otherwise copy is written once per recipient with the first touch and replayed, so the first touch's guidance steers every touch. For a campaign that enters by API, the writer also receives the entry event's properties as context for why this person entered. The guidance for every touch stays editable after launch and applies to copy written after the change. The writing setup in Settings still applies to every campaign: its tone, its required phrases, and the claims it rules out. ## The landing page opening A campaign can also write a personal opening for its landing page: one paragraph of at most 600 characters per recipient, written in the same call as the piece and reviewed with it. The page Sincerely hosts shows it first. A response link that leaves for your own site does not use it. [Landing pages](https://trysincerely.com/docs/landing-pages) covers where the link can point. ## Two review modes | Mode | What happens | | ------------------------ | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Review every draft | Every piece waits for a person to edit, approve or reject. Every change is versioned. | | Auto after a review ramp | The first ten pieces written from account research or with generated spans wait for review. Later drafts can proceed without a per-piece click. | Choose review-every-draft when each fact needs a person. Budget limits, frequency caps, suppression, postal checks and the approved design apply to every piece in either mode. ## A campaign's drafts The Drafts tab on a campaign lists every recipient's copy for that campaign: the words that print, the generated fields, the landing page opening, the facts behind them with their sources, and the writer's reason for what it wrote. The Copy review count on the campaign page links there. Under the words, a draft shows the mailer it prints on and the page a scan of that mailer opens, filled in for that recipient. That is your published page as it stands today, or the house page when the mailer routes to none, so publishing a new version later changes what the scan opens. Campaigns shows which campaigns have copy waiting. A campaign with drafts that can still print carries a chip such as `3 to review`, which opens its Drafts tab, and a line above the list counts them across every campaign. On a campaign page, the Drafts tab label carries the same count on every tab. The Review button on that line, and "Review 3 one at a time" on the Drafts tab, open the waiting drafts one at a time, and deciding one brings up the next. From a draft you can approve it, edit it, or send it back with a note. An edit to a generated field or to the opening is checked against the same length and wording rules the writer follows. A note sends the draft back to be written again, and you can also add the note to the guidance for every touch so later drafts follow it. The guidance holds 2,000 characters, and a note that would take it past that is refused before anything is rewritten. The tab has two other campaign-wide actions. Review clean drafts opens the waiting drafts that have no weak fact and approves them together once you confirm the count. Rewrite waiting drafts writes the waiting drafts again from the current personalization guidance, at most 20 at a time. Each rewrite spends the workspace's model credits, so the count appears before you confirm. Drafts you edited by hand stay as they are, and nothing is approved or sent by a rewrite. ## Bulk approval is a consequential action Approving a queue of drafts in one action commits money and paper, so an agent asking to do it while the campaign can still print gets a confirmation card with counts and cost rather than a done message. Rewriting a campaign's waiting drafts gets a card too, because it spends model credits, unless an owner or admin has turned off Ask before drafting steps in Settings. The rewrites still wait for review. See [confirmations](https://trysincerely.com/docs/mcp-confirmations). ## What to read next [Campaigns](https://trysincerely.com/docs/campaigns) covers what schedules these pieces and what stops them colliding. [Personalization](https://trysincerely.com/personalization) is the marketing-side account of the same writing system. --- Sincerely is personalized direct mail and gifting for B2B revenue teams: postcards, letters, handwritten mail, and gifts, each written for one recipient. Contact Sincerely: https://trysincerely.com/contact Agent routing index: https://trysincerely.com/llms.txt Listings: https://www.g2.com/products/sincerely and https://www.producthunt.com/products/sincerely