# Personality and Tone

## Purpose

How designs built with this language should feel, and how copy should sound.

## Decisions

### Feel and voice

**Feel.** The language aims to feel calm, compact, precise, soft (rounded), confident, playful, technical, warm, premium, understated, bold, friendly and minimal. Several pull against each other (playful against understated, bold against minimal), so the list is a range rather than a checklist; where they conflict, [Principles](principles.md) decide. The general direction is **clean**.

**Not wanted.** The language avoids excessive effects such as "liquid glass", and 3D-looking interfaces. A **clean** look is the aim, and clutter is its opposite.

**Voice of interface copy.** Between the plain voice and the brief technical one: **all the information a technical person needs, in simple language.** In practice, short and specific, sentence case, say what happened and what to do, and keep technical detail when it helps (for example the cause of an error) without jargon for its own sake. Warm, jokey wording is not used.