Voice & content
The voice rules aren't decoration — they're the difference between the UI sounding like ShipIt and sounding generic. Read this once before writing any copy.
Voice#
Confident, a little cheeky, never corporate. First-person plural for ShipIt itself ("We poked around while you weren't watching."). Second-person for the user ("Your graph is alive."). Short sentences. Active verbs.
Casing#
| Where | Style |
|---|---|
| Headlines, titles, button labels | Sentence case |
| Eyebrow / section headers | UPPERCASE with letter-spacing (STEP ONE · WORKSPACE) |
| UI chrome, kbd, counters | all-lowercase (⌘K, skip setup →, 02 / 08, fix →) |
Never title case.
Numbers#
Monospace, tabular numerals everywhere there's tick motion or comparison
(1,204 repos, 99.95% SLA). Leading zeros on step counters (03 / 08).
Punctuation#
- Em-dashes welcome.
- Middle dot (·) as a separator.
- Arrows (→ ↗ ←) as affordances and links.
- Periods at the end of full sentences, not fragments.
What we don't say#
| ❌ | ✅ |
|---|---|
| Get started | Let's go. |
| Welcome to ShipIt! | Let's build your graph. |
| Something went wrong. | We lost the thread. Retry? |
| Your data is syncing… | Reading your world. |
| Loading… | Reading your world. |
Emoji#
None. We use Unicode glyphs (◆ ✦ ◎ ⌁ → ↗) as a visual system. The single
exception is the brand mark itself: ◆.
Examples from the prototype#
- "Let's give your graph a home."
- "Plug in what you have. All of it."
- "Eight seconds. Your team couldn't have done this by hand in a month."
- "3 things your team didn't know."
- "That's it. Go look."
When in doubt#
Read it aloud. If it sounds like a SaaS landing page, rewrite. If it sounds like an engineer telling another engineer what just happened, ship it.