Brand
Vintage computing, modern wire
One mono wordmark, an espresso ground with jewel accents, and IBM Plex everywhere. Everything on this page is what the site itself uses.
Wordmark
One word, set in the terminal's own type
IBM Plex Mono Medium, uppercase, tracked at 0.12em. No icon, no glyph: the wordmark is the logo. Use the dark mark on light grounds and the light mark on dark or brand grounds.
Color
Espresso ground, jewel accents
1970s vintage computing: a warm near-black brown, cream ink, and saturated jewel tones that glow against it. The light theme is the same system on a white field.
The espresso theme
Espresso
oklch(19% 0.038 52)
Espresso 200
oklch(23% 0.04 52)
Espresso 300
oklch(29% 0.042 50)
Cream ink
oklch(92% 0.03 84)
Topaz · primary
oklch(74% 0.155 65)
Ruby · secondary
oklch(71% 0.165 22)
Emerald · accent
oklch(74% 0.13 158)
Sapphire · info
oklch(75% 0.12 248)
Avocado · success
oklch(64% 0.14 150)
Amber · warning
oklch(76% 0.15 70)
The light theme
Paper
oklch(99% 0.002 85)
Paper 200
oklch(96.5% 0.003 85)
Paper 300
oklch(92% 0.004 85)
Ink
oklch(20% 0.01 75)
Gold · primary
oklch(64% 0.14 62)
Section grounds · the sibling themes
Emerald ground
oklch(25% 0.06 158)
Sapphire ground
oklch(26% 0.055 256)
Amethyst ground
oklch(25% 0.055 315)
Same jewel accents, a different ground hue per section. The app directory extends this mechanically: one brand hex becomes a full theme with the ground clamped into this band, so any brand color stays legible.
Typography
One superfamily: IBM Plex
Sans for interface and display, Mono for the terminal voice (kickers, commands, receipts), Serif for the rare editorial aside. One family, so everything reads as kin.
IBM Plex Sans
You ship a CLI.
Interface, headlines, and body copy. Bold and tight for display, regular and relaxed for reading.
IBM Plex Mono
$ terminalwire
Kickers & receipts
Commands, kickers, window titles, spec-tag receipt lines.
IBM Plex Serif
"It's really just about design."
Pull quotes and editorial asides, sparingly.
Texture
Faint pattern, never decoration
Each section may carry one quiet texture drawn from its own ink color. Dots for heroes and tiles, grid for engineering surfaces, hatch and iso for variety between sections.
Components
The working parts
Buttons
Chips & pills
Claim card
Auto-updates are signed and fail closed
offline root key · SHA-256 pinned
The terminal window
Install block
$ curl -sSL https://terminalwire.sh | bash
Copy
Voice
Fast, truthful, to the point
Every line is read by two people at once: a founder who doesn't code and the most senior engineer in the room. Write so the first one follows and the second one can't catch you overpromising.
Fast
one line if one line covers it
The reader is mid-task. Front-load the answer; depth is optional and comes after.
Truthful
every claim maps to a mechanism
If we can't point at how the software does it, we don't say it. Say what we don't do, too: we count installs, not people.
To the point
mechanisms, not adjectives
Never "seamless", "effortless", or "saves time". Name the work that disappears: no updater to build, no version skew to manage.
Two readers
plain words, precise claims
Simplify with analogies, not vagueness. "Sandboxed like a browser" orients anyone; an engineer reads it as default-deny with per-origin grants. Both are right.
Not this
"Terminalwire seamlessly streamlines your CLI workflow, empowering teams to ship effortlessly."
This
"Your commands run on your server. We keep the client on every machine current."
Mechanics
Restructure a sentence rather than reach for an em-dash. Verbatim quotes, window titles, and code keep their own punctuation. Trust copy says what the software is, never what it isn't in scary words.