Voice & copy

The voice tests harder than any visual rule. If a sentence could appear on a generic SaaS landing page, rewrite it.

Scope

These rules apply to product and marketing surfaces: anything rendered in Berkeley Mono on a uinaf-controlled canvas — uinaf.dev marketing pages, blog posts, terms, OG/social images, slides, email, terminal banners, in-product UI strings.

They do not govern documentation surfaces: product docs pages, README.md, CHANGELOG.md, docs/*.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, SECURITY.md, AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, GitHub issue and PR templates. Those target people looking for commands, contracts, or contributor guidance, and use proper-case headlines with sentence-case body. See repo-docs.md for repo collaboration docs. Voice rules 2–5 below still apply there; only the lowercase rule is carved out.

The five rules

1. Lowercase. Always on product and marketing surfaces. Headings, nav, buttons, product names, the company name. The legal entity ("undefined is not a function LLC") is the only exception, and only when it must appear verbatim. Documentation surfaces are out of scope — they use proper-case headlines and sentence-case body.
2. Short. Single sentences. Paragraphs are 1–3 sentences. Lists run short.
3. Direct. No filler ("simply", "just", "easily"), no qualifiers ("essentially", "basically"), no SaaS verbs ("empower", "unlock", "elevate", "transform").
4. Dry. Wit lives in the content, not in punctuation. No exclamation marks. No em-dash drama. No emoji.
5. Specific. A literal description of what something does beats a benefit statement. tccutil — CLI helpers for managing macOS TCC permissions. not tccutil — take back control of macOS privacy.

What it sounds like

These are lifted from production:

• we bet you've seen us before
• we build software. if it has a screen, we've probably shipped something for it.
• terminals, browsers, phones, TVs, set-top boxes, and more.
• ten years in, still having fun.
• open-source tools we actively build and maintain.
• credit where it's due.
• these terms apply when you use our services, unless we agree to something else in writing.
• we fix bugs caused by our work.
• we don't guarantee perfection. software has edge cases.

What it never sounds like

Pure SaaS landing-page sludge:

• ❌ "Empowering teams to ship faster."
• ❌ "AI-native automation for the modern enterprise."
• ❌ "Reimagining the developer workflow."
• ❌ "Unlock the full potential of your stack."
• ❌ "We're on a mission to…"
• ❌ "You deserve better tooling."

If a draft trips the SaaS detector, scrap it and write what the thing literally does.

Pronouns

• "we" — first-person plural, for the studio
• "you" — second-person, used sparingly and only in actual instructions ("you'll need a Berkeley Mono license"), never in marketing-flattery ("you deserve…")

Casing edge cases

• Code identifiers, file paths, URLs: keep their canonical case (AGENTS.md, tile.json, https://uinaf.dev).
• Quoted proper nouns: keep their canonical case ("Berkeley Mono", "undefined is not a function LLC").
• Everything else in product-surface body and chrome: lowercase.

Punctuation

• Periods at the end of sentence fragments are fine.
• Em dashes for parenthetical breaks. Never as decorative bullets.
• Middle dot · (U+00B7) as a separator in footer link clusters: projects · terms · thanks.
• Unicode arrows: ↗ trailing every external link, → for forward, ← ↑ ↓ sparingly in dashboards.
• No exclamation marks. None.
• No emoji. None.

Microcopy patterns

Product / project copy

healthd — small daemon for machine health checks and reporting.
tccutil — CLI helpers for managing macOS TCC permissions.
berkeley mono — typeface by Berkeley Graphics.

Pattern: name — literal one-line description. Em dash. Period at end. Lowercase name. Description describes what it is or does, not what value it provides.

Long-form prose

For terms and acknowledgements: same voice, just more of it. Cordon long-form into its own scroll container so the rest of the page stays sparse. Documentation keeps the same direct, dry voice, but uses documentation casing.

Quick checklist

Before shipping copy, scan for:

• Any uppercase letters in body or chrome on product and marketing surfaces → lowercase them. Skip this check for documentation surfaces: product docs pages, README.md, CHANGELOG.md, docs/*.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, SECURITY.md, AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, and GitHub templates.
• Exclamation marks → delete
• Emoji → delete
• "empower", "unlock", "elevate", "transform", "synergies", "simply", "just", "essentially" → rewrite
• "We're on a mission to…", "You deserve…", "Built for…" → scrap and start over
• Sentences over 20 words → cut in half
• Marketing-flattery toward the reader → cut