Voice & casing

Rendered — do / don't pairs

Sentence case — UI

DoForm an entity

Don'tForm An Entity

Sentence case everywhere except two-word Title Case buttons.

Title case — button

DoGet Started

Don'tGet started

Two-word CTAs render Title Case so the verb leads the eye.

Verb-first imperative

DoSign every document

Don'tDocument signing made easy

Lead with the verb. No marketing copula.

Self-contained — no comparisons

DoMatter is the corporate infrastructure API.

Don'tMatter's analog of Stripe Atlas for entities.

Never compare to other products in copy, descriptions, or marketing.

Tone

Precise · confident · humble · future. Four words that govern every line of copy Matter ships — marketing pages, dashboard strings, OpenAPI descriptions, error messages, CMS body content.

Precise — name the thing, not the category. "C-Corp formation in Delaware" not "business setup". "Form 966" not "the dissolution paperwork". Concrete nouns, exact thresholds, named jurisdictions.
Confident — declarative sentences. No hedging ("might", "perhaps", "we believe"), no softening trailers ("if that makes sense"). State what Matter does; if a claim is conditional, name the condition.
Humble — describe what Matter does plainly, never bombastic. No "revolutionary", "groundbreaking", "the future of X". The work speaks for itself; if it doesn't, more adjectives won't help. Use "we" rarely — prefer the user's frame.
Future — write toward how corporate work is going to be, not how it has historically been done. Lifecycle, programmable entities, agent-native authorisation. Past-tense framing ("legacy", "old way") is rarely needed; describe Matter's shape directly.

These four words operate as a single voice, not four dials. A sentence is on-tone when all four read as obviously true at once.

Casing

Sentence case for every UI surface: page titles, sidebar headings, table headers, descriptions.
Two-word Title Case for buttons: "Get Started", "View Details", "Sign Document".

Italics never ship. No font-style: italic, no italicized <em>, no italicized blockquote. The system has zero italic styles across web, app, and docs. For emphasis use font-weight: 500 with the canonical ink token; for accent moments use scale, colour, or the mono family. The one exception is the <Italic> / .serif-italic component, an Instrument Serif accent run reserved for display-size headlines only. Body italics — including <em> — render upright at weight 500.

Glyphs

✺ — the Matter spark. Allowed as the only logographic flourish, never decorative.
› — the inline chevron-right. Used in breadcrumbs and "›" trailers.
‹ — the inline chevron-left. Used in back-links ("‹ All writing", "‹ Back to filings").
No emoji anywhere else.

Comparisons

Never compare Matter to other products. No "Matter's analog of X," no "borrowed from Y's cookbook." Describe what Matter does plainly and self-contained. Factual references to standards (RFC 7807, OAuth 2.1, MCP) are fine.

Cross-references

Brand philosophy: Brand — "Freedom · open spaces · dreamy textures · colour · abstract."
Italic ban (long form): Authoring rules — Type & emphasis.
Bloom + text: Blooms — text in front of a bloom is always white, and the bloom always carries the veil.