INDEX / STYLEGUIDE
How OSCILLA is written.
Every word on this site passes the same test: would it survive contact with the measurement? The style rules exist because marketing language and engineering language fight for the same sentence, and on this site engineering wins.
- Every number is traceable to a measurement or a policy. No rounding for drama, no "industry-leading" as a synonym for a value we decline to print.
- No em dashes. The aside sits between commas or becomes its own sentence, like it would if a person were saying it out loud.
- No decorative adjectives for hardware. A filter is not "stunning." It passes its tolerance or it does not.
- Corrections publish where the mistake was made, with the date and the delta. The glossary, the lab notes, and the changelog all carry live examples.
- Prices are printed, identical everywhere, and never described as "competitive."
- Community contributions are named in the documents they shaped, including the arguments that lost.
- Nothing is "revolutionary." Modules evolve. Revolutions are for people selling you the next one before finishing the last one.
THE TEST, WRITTEN ON THE BENCH WALL
If a sentence would not survive contact with the measurement, the measurement wins and the sentence is rewritten.
If a sentence would survive contact with the measurement but adds nothing the measurement does not already say, the sentence is deleted.
MODULES
All caps, one word or hyphenated, with a number only when the number is part of the function: HELIOS-8 is an eight-voice module, ARRAY-16 is a sixteen-stage sequencer. No roman numerals, no "Mk" suffixes. Revisions live in firmware, not in the name.
MEASUREMENTS
SI units with a non-breaking space, tolerances signed, frequencies in Hz with k and M prefixes. Batch data cites the batch, never "typical." A value without a batch or a policy behind it does not appear in copy.
PEOPLE
Full names on first mention, initials after. Community contributors are named exactly as they sign their work. Nobody on this site is "a leading artist."
| Write this | Not this | Why |
|---|---|---|
| "Tracking error stays under 0.04% across the full range, measured per batch." | "Flawless tracking across the range." | The measurement exists. Print it and let it work. |
| "The first batch of 120 units is sold out. The next batch opens November 3." | "Due to overwhelming demand..." | Scarcity is a fact here, not a sales technique. |
| "We were wrong about the default. Here is the batch and the fix." | "We have improved the experience." | Corrections build the trust the apology was avoiding. |
| "It is a good filter. It is not a magic filter." | "The best filter you will ever hear." | The reader owns ears and a refund policy. Respect both. |
| "Free recalibration, forever, at either studio." | "Industry-leading lifetime support." | Terms, not trophies. |
TYPE
Space Grotesk for display and body, JetBrains Mono for labels, data, and the small print that does the trusting. Both self-hosted as variable WOFF2s, so the fonts you read loaded from this site and nowhere else.
SYSTEM
Hand-written HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. No frameworks, no build step, no third-party requests of any kind. Every visual is type, SVG, or canvas; the site loads like a document and animates like an instrument.
MOTION
Micro-interactions at 100 to 300 milliseconds, transform and opacity only. The oscilloscope is the only continuous animation, and it goes still the moment your system asks it to.
This page and every claim on this site are part of a design portfolio demonstration. The company is fictional. The writing rules are not.