Three Words for the Voice: Clinical, Lore-Faithful, Mineral

What this means for you

The voice is three words. Clinical. Lore-faithful. Mineral. PRODUCT.md states them and DESIGN.md enforces them as Named Rules at the token layer, so an editor and a sub-agent can both check the same boundary.

The pitch

Clinical is a register choice. Declarative voice, no celebration, no exclamation, no second-person sales copy. Labels are terse. The room is NASA mission-control transcripts and Linear changelog rigor. Lore-faithful is a content choice. Project Hail Mary is the canon, Erid is the homeworld of Rocky’s species, every citizen name traces back. Mineral is a surface choice. The palette reads as substrate, not interface. Rust on iron is the single deliberate accent, used at most ten percent of any surface at rest.

Who it’s for

A copywriter, designer, or sub-agent producing words or pixels for an erid.tech surface and asking what the boundary is.

Proof points

• Mineral palette is seven values, all OKLCH-grounded: oxide hue 22, signal hue 264, void family hue 268, all neutrals tinted toward the navy hue, never #000000 or #FFFFFF
• Two type registers only, never blended on one element: Inter for human-authored prose, JetBrains Mono for machine-originated strings (run IDs, schema keys, citizen subdomains)
• Display weight is Inter 300, a deliberate lever for “confident understatement, not frailty” against a void substrate where heavier weights would read as enterprise-admin
• Eleven Named Rules in DESIGN.md (Ten Percent Oxide, No Status Color, Tinted-Neutral, Two Register, Sentence-Case Mono, Italic-As-Scene, No-Shadow, Hairline, plus three citizen-surface inheritors), each enforceable by a sub-agent with the rule quoted verbatim

mindmap
  root((Voice))
    Clinical
      declarative
      no exclamation
      labels terse
      Linear changelog rigor
    Lore-faithful
      Project Hail Mary canon
      Erid is the homeworld
      every citizen name traces back
    Mineral
      seven-value palette
      oxide ten percent maximum
      tonal stepping not shadow