Serious about the record.
Light about the drinking.
The obvious way to sound relaxed is to dismiss whisky. The obvious way to sound credible is to revere it. Both are wrong. The database is not a joke. The hobby can be faintly ridiculous.
Complete bottle records. Every cask. Corrections welcome. What a source said, in the scale it used.
Paying real money for a 1983. Owning 41 bottles and opening 6. Having an opinion about the gap between an 88 and an 89.
The 5 rules
1 · The joke is in the noun, never in the delivery
Use understatement. Do not add exclamation marks, winks, or a nudge to make a line land. If the words are not enough, cut the joke.
Unicorn · 95 and upNames the tier and admits the tier is slightly absurd.2 · Specificity is the humour
Say the number. A precise fact is more useful and usually funnier than a vague claim. Vagueness is where copy goes to be cute.
Lots of ratings2,841 people have an opinion about thisYou own 41 bottles. You have opened 6.3 · No jargon, including ours
Use the words a drinker knows. Our internal terms are worse than trade jargon because we put them there. Product-marketing language says even less.
Trade jargonexpression · liquid · NAS without expansion · organoleptic · the water of lifeOurs — the worst listaggregate · entity · canonical · verdict · grain · bandProduct marketingcurated · discover · journey · unlock · seamless · experience · community-driven4 · Never flatter the whisky or the reader
Describe what is recorded and let the reader decide. Reverence reads as pretension. Flattery reads as an app trying to be your friend.
beautifully crafted · liquid gold · a true classicgreat choice · you’re on a roll · nice palate5 · Humour falls as frustration rises
A first-run empty state can carry dry wit. A failed sign-in cannot. Never joke about the reader’s data, taste, or spending. Joke about the hobby or about us.
- Empty states and first run
- Driest wit
- Labels and headings
- Plain and specific
- Forms in progress
- Nothing clever
- Errors, data loss, auth
- Zero jokes
Real strings, rewritten
Preserve the useful fact. Remove the brochure voice, empty praise, and jokes that get in the way.
One fact, 3 voices
“A dram of remarkable provenance, matured for forty-six years in the cool Islay air.”
“46 years old and absolutely sending it. Get involved.”
“Forty-six years in and the smoke has turned to embers — extraordinary, and priced accordingly.”
Mechanics
Use “dram” sparingly
It is vernacular, not jargon. Use it at most once per screen, never in a heading, and never as a cute plural.
Use second person and contractions
Write “You haven’t logged anything yet,” not “No tastings have been recorded.”
Use numerals for counts
Write “6 bottles” in labels, stats, scores, and ages. Running prose can spell a number when it reads better.
Use sentence case
Title Case reads like a brochure. Mono capitals are a visual device, not a voice.
Invite the fix
Write “We don’t have this one yet. Add it?” Do not apologise for an incomplete database.
Do not name feelings
We know what someone poured. We do not know how they felt beyond what they recorded.