Product#

Register#

brand

Users#

Solo developers who keep a backlog in their repo — and the AI agents that share that backlog with them. Their context is a git working tree, an editor, and a terminal; their scar is a tracker that became a migration project. They are distrustful of lock-in and fluent in local-first / indieweb values.

The brand surface (diarie.dev, the brand/ pages) speaks to the skeptical arrival: someone who reads "another task tracker?" and expects to be sold to. The page's job is to earn trust in under a screen from a reader who will judge the argument by whether the artifact making it is honest.

Product Purpose#

diarie is a flat-YAML task tracker that is just files: the CLI reads a backlog your editor writes, and refuses to misrepresent itself. It exists to fix one class of bug — a tracker that cannot find its store must never look like an empty backlog. Git is the database; leaving is free; uninstall it and the backlog is still there.

diarie.dev exists to make that argument credibly, not loudly. Success is a developer trusting diarie with a real backlog because the page itself demonstrated the ethos: one static document, zero external requests, view-source honest, no tracking, survives curl / file:// / the Internet Archive. The medium is the proof.

Brand Personality#

Three words: registry-honest, herbarium-warm, klarspråk-plain.

The voice is klarspråk — cared-for, simple, comprehensible (Språklagen 2009:600 §11), the register of a Swedish myndighet's registry at its best. It names the consequence, not the adjective ("invalid priority urgent — it will be treated as medium", never "invalid input"). The refusal is part of the product: say no plainly, give the reason, name the revival trigger, never apologize for a design decision. No superlatives. diarie is always lowercase — it is a command, not a company. The tool is never anthropomorphized past its one licensed phrase: the reader is honest. Swedish is seasoning, glossed on first use — never a gatekeeping handshake.

The emotional target is calm confidence, not delight or urgency — the smallest possible claim on the reader's attention (calm technology). A skeptical developer should relax, not be excited.

Anti-references#

The identity is defined as much by what it refuses. This page must NOT look or sound like:

• The default 2026 AI aesthetic — dark ground + a single acid-green accent, full stop. diarie's palette is dark-with-green, so specificity has to be earned by everything the default lacks: paper, the stamps, stepped light, amber and red as full citizens, and accents that are checkable semantic claims. If it could read as "AI made that," it has failed.
• SaaS landing tropes — the hero-metric template (big number + gradient accent), identical icon-heading-text card grids, a tracked uppercase eyebrow above every section, stars-counter theater, "trusted by" logo walls.
• Marketing vocabulary — blazing, seamless, powerful, supercharge, game-changing, simply, just (the adverb), and any sentence beginning "Unlock". Any sentence that would survive unchanged on a generic SaaS page is wrong.
• Decorative effects — gradient text, gradient glow (the halo is stepped risograph light, never lens flare), glassmorphism as default, side-stripe accent borders, a mascot (the twinflower is a specimen, not a character).
• Dark-pattern motion — pulsing CTAs, fake urgency, confetti at the moment of a decision. Motion never leans on a choice.
• Anything that betrays the thesis — tracking, cookies, a consent banner, a third-party font CDN, analytics, or a brand asset behind a login. A registry that surveils its readers has misunderstood which way the transparency goes.

Design Principles#

1. Practice what you preach. The artifact must embody its own argument. A page that says "own your data, no lock-in" ships as one static HTML document, zero external requests, self-hosted fonts, view-source honest. The medium is the evidence; if the page needed a third party to render its own name, it would have lost the argument the project exists to make.
2. The refusal is the pitch. Leaving is free, and saying so is the brand. Make the exit the closing line on any surface; present non-goals as identity, never as apology.
3. Every accent is a claim you can check. Color, motion, and copy map to the tool's real semantics — the exit-code contract in visual form (fosfor = exit 0 / ready, bärnsten = exit 1, stämpel = exit 2 / the rejection stamp). Nothing decorative may be mistaken for meaning.
4. Name the consequence, not the adjective. klarspråk over marketing: plain claims, glossed loanwords, no superlatives. The strongest available sentence is "That is the whole product."
5. Scarcity makes the system legible. One anchor (the diarium), two subordinate motifs (herbarium, genomlysning), two typefaces, one easing, semantic-only accents, at most three motion beats per page. Restraint is the identity itself, not minimalism worn as a style.

Accessibility & Inclusion#

• WCAG 2.x AA, verified, with APCA as the stricter cross-check. Every text token's contrast ratio is measured and recorded in BRAND.md; where WCAG and APCA disagree, APCA wins. Size-restricted tokens (hektograf on arkiv at Lc −22; stämpel-ljus at Lc −46) are held to their documented uses — borders/display and short labels respectively, never paragraphs.
• Reduced motion is full parity, not a degraded fallback: prefers-reduced-motion gets the complete page rendered at once — the same information, calm.
• Color is annotation, never the message. Meaning is never carried by hue alone; in the CLI, NO_COLOR and non-TTY output lose no information.
• Privacy is an accessibility stance. Self-hosted fonts with font-display: swap, no CDN, no tracking, no cookies, no consent banner — nothing to consent to.