Design systemDraft

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Voice#

• Plain, short, calm. Say what happened and what the person can do. No exclamation marks, no cheerleading, no apologies for normal behaviour.
• Sentence case everywhere: titles, buttons, labels, menus. No caps labels and no letter-spaced mono captions.
• No em dashes and no section-sign character, in any text: use a colon, a comma or a middle dot.
• Labels carry no full stop. Sentences in a description do.
• One idea per line. A second line is meta (--label), not a longer sentence.

Names#

• The person is "you" on their own screens: "You handed back to kit", "Your phone has the keyboard". Never their name where they are the reader. Other people's names appear only where they did something.
• Agents by name, lower case as they are set: kit, juno. The assistant's name comes from onboarding.
• Devices by their names: "alex's iPhone", "Chrome on alex's Pixel 8". On owner-facing copy, "Your phone", "Your laptop", "Your Lumen".
• Projects by name: Harlow Legal. Another client's name never appears on a screen that belongs to a different project (screens are shared with clients).
• Machine words stay in mono and only where they are what the person types or reads back: commands, paths, IDs, keys, codes. Tool names are never shown to the person.

Buttons#

• A verb, or a verb and an object: Allow once, Send, Start building, Trust this browser, Add your phone. Not OK, Yes, Submit (except a question card's Submit), Confirm.
• Destructive labels name what goes, with a count: "Delete 214 files", "Forget 3 memories", "Remove alex's Pixel 8".
• Busy labels keep the button's width and use the verb in progress: Allowing, Sending, Saving.
• "Always in Harlow Legal", not "Always allow" or "Remember".
• Cancel, Deny, Discard, Not now and Later are ghosts.

States#

• Empty: a short noun phrase and the first action inline ("No projects yet" and a name field). No illustrations, no "Oops".
• Loading: no words at first (the skeleton says it); after 10 s "The box is slow to answer".
• Error: what failed, in plain words, then the detail in mono, then a way out: "Couldn't load kit's history" / ECONNRESET after 15 s / Retry.
• Offline: say what waits and when it goes: "Queued · sends when the box is back".
• Decided: past tense and who: "Allowed once by you · 14:22", "Expired after 24 h".
• Never blame the person; never say "unknown error".

Numbers, times and units#

• Times of day 24-hour: 14:22. Relative ages short: 12m, 3h, 2d; "just now" under a minute.
• Durations: "2m 14s", "0:42" for a running timer, "5 min" in a sentence.
• Counts with the noun: "3 of 5", "99+" on badges, "Load 40 more".
• Money with the currency: "$5 cap per session".
• Middle dot ( · ) joins meta: "kit · Harlow Legal · 12m".

Words#