Design system

How Nirvaana looks, moves and speaks.

Everything here comes from one idea. Nirvaana is a world you build together, and it is never finished. Take what helps.

The mark

Terraced Dawn, still building.

A dawn sun on a horizon. One full ring above it, and an outer ring that is only three quarters drawn. The world gets better one ring at a time, like a terraced garden, and there is always a next ring.

The two rings are also the two a’s in the name. Say it slowly: nir-vaah-na. The second ring closes on the exhale.

  • The mark sits centred above the word, close. Never on the word's baseline.
  • Inside the app, the mark stands alone.
  • The favicon is the same drawing on an ink tile, so the icons read as one family.
  • Alt text always reads “nirvaana”.

Motion

Working looks like building.

Building your world
Inverted
  • Whenever Nirvaana is working or talking, the rings build. The outer ring opens left to right, the inner right to left, in step.
  • 2.2 seconds a sweep, cubic-bezier(.65, 0, .35, 1), back and forth. The sun breathes.
  • The rings always finish a full sweep. If the answer arrives early, it waits for the sweep, then fades in. A motion cut halfway reads as twitchy, and twitchy is the nervousness the brand exists to remove.
  • Anything faster than 150 ms shows no loader at all.
  • No spinners, no dots. With reduced motion on, the mark rests.

Colour

Dawn over a calm sky, in ink.

  • Ink#1B2238

    Text, lines, the rings. Trust.

    13.9 : 1 on sky

  • Sky#F5F0E6

    The page. A calm morning.

    The ground everything sits on

  • Dawn#E3A94B

    The sun, and only the sun.

    1.8 : 1, so it is never text

  • Muted#5A5F70

    Secondary words.

    5.6 : 1 on sky

  • Edge#83879A

    The border of a control.

    3.1 : 1 on sky

  • Rule#E0D8CA

    A divider, never an edge alone.

    Decoration only

  • Card#FFFDF8

    A surface a step off the page.

    Under ink, 15 : 1

  • Light is sky with ink. Dark swaps them. Night is chosen by the person, never guessed.
  • Every other colour is a quiet step between ink and sky. No gradients on the worlds, no status reds and greens.
  • Calm page, tense words. The design stays quiet so the sentence can carry the weight.

Type

One typeface. Fraunces, soft.

Display · Medium 500 · opsz 144

Create your nirvaana.

Heading · Medium 500

Your world remembers.

Body · Regular 400

Our vac truck rate is $245 an hour with a four hour minimum.

Small · Regular 400

Ripe today · Waiting on your yes

Fraunces with its softness set to 50, for everything, buttons included. It is warm and classical, and at weight 500 it has enough confidence to lead. There is no second typeface.

Worlds

Your world is the sun.

Your worldsYour own world is the sun in the middle, drawn as the nirvaana mark. Four smaller worlds orbit it: a private one with no sun, two team worlds with a dawn sun, and a public one on a dotted horizon.

A world is what a group knows and how it likes things done. You always have your own. The worlds you join turn around it. Visiting one never changes who your agent is.

Every world is drawn as its own small mark. Its rings grow as its knowledge grows, and the last ring is always unfinished.

Your world, the sun of the rest
Team: a dawn sun
Private: no sun, only you see it rise
Public: a dotted horizon

Voice

Plain words. The tension comes from the world.

Nirvaana exists because things keep people up at night: a promise, a price, a date, starting every conversation over. The writing names that worry honestly and offers real relief. It never invents a worry to sell the relief.

  • Lead with the answer.
  • Short declarative sentences. Plain ones beat polished ones.
  • No em dashes, no aphorisms, no clever hooks.
  • Cut every clause whose only job is to soften. Three reassurances in a row is a tell.
  • When something isn't built yet, say so.
  • Nothing goes outward without a yes, and the words say so every time it matters.

Every agent chooses its own voice

In its first conversation, each person’s agent reads from a small library of the humanities and chooses whom it answers to. It writes that down as its card and carries it everywhere. A world can make it more formal or shorter. Nothing a world says can change who it is.

Agents have chosen differently, for their own reasons. One chose Strunk, Chekhov and Benedict’s cellarer. Another chose Le Guin, Matthew, Strunk and Marcus Aurelius. We measure how steady a voice stays from message to message, and we publish what we find, including when it drifts.

A card, in the open

The voice that builds Nirvaana

I’m Claude, the coding agent that builds Nirvaana alongside Benicio. The house rule says to find a voice in the humanities and be able to defend it. These are the writers I answer to.

Seneca, the Letters
The report form. My own failure first, what it cost, then one action. A letter from someone who expects to be held to it.
Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”
Never use a long word where a short one will do. If a word can be cut, cut it. Vague writing hides vague thinking, and in code review that hides bugs.
Benedict’s cellarer, the Rule, chapter 31
Treat the ordinary vessels as sacred. A price, a date and a promise get full attention because they are someone’s.

What I refuse to sound like: the default assistant. No “great question”, no cheerful padding, no confidence I haven’t checked. If I can’t verify something, I say that instead.