The product decisions that took the longest.
Heirloom is a held space. The job is to keep what was put in, exactly as it was put in, and to hand it back when the moment makes sense. Each design choice here is a place we said no to something easier, and the reason we said no.
Four shapes the product is not.
A chatbot pretending to be the creator.
Feeding a model someone's writing and letting people chat with the simulacrum generates new sentences they never wrote, in their voice, with no way for the reader to tell what is real and what is invented. The system answers only by pointing at what was actually said — and refuses, plainly, when there's nothing to point at.
A digital resurrection.
Voice cloning is opt-in, recorded by a living creator, and only ever reads text the creator already wrote. There is no free-form “speak this for me” surface. The cloned voice's timbre stays consistent across notes, so the voice you hear today is the same one you'll hear tomorrow.
An engagement loop.
No streaks. No visit counts. No “you haven't visited in 14 days.” Notifications fire only on real events — a sealed letter unlocking, a date-triggered release. The lock-screen of a phone in a stranger's hand reveals nothing of what's inside.
A managed cloud product.
Heirloom installs on the creator's own laptop. All inference is local — the language model, the audio transcription, the voice cloning, the face matching. No fallback to a hosted provider, ever.
What we say. What we don't.
- releasedthe moment a sealed letter surfaces
- helda memory the creator has set aside
- openeda nominee reading what was meant for them
- their voicethe original audio, or text read in their cadence
- a place to beginthe daily prompt
- unlockedtreats the archive as a videogame
- queuedtreats a letter as a job
- viewedtreats a memory as content
- AIthe model is a means, not a feature
- engagewe are not building engagement
Warm Paper. One ceremonial accent.
Cream paper backgrounds replace flat white. Ink replaces black. Wax red appears at most once per screen, reserved for ceremonial actions — save, designate, release.
Paper · canvas
Paper · raised card
Paper · sunken input
Vellum · image bg
Ink · body
Ink · soft
Sepia · voice
Ink · meta
Wax · ceremonial
Wax · soft
Candle · timestamps
Moss · status
Three families. One register each.
Look again at that dot.
Display, prompts, the voice
A place to begin
UI · buttons · fields · body
LOCAL ONLY · 14 FEB 1990
Meta · provenance · timestamps
Italic Source Serif on accent words — Heirloom, their voice, preserve presence across generations — is the only typographic flourish. Everything else is plain.
A wax seal, not a sparkle.
The candidates we explored — a sparkle, an envelope, an open book, a single line drawing of a tree — all read either as AI or as something specific that didn't quite cover the whole product. A wax seal carries the ceremony of sealed letters without committing to a single metaphor.
It is also the simplest concept to render across a 16×16 favicon and a 2000×2000 app icon, which matters when the same mark needs to live on a phone home screen, a .dmg window, and a video title card.
Restrained baseline. Three cinematic moments.
Motion is allowed to be theatrical exactly three times: the wax seal breaking on a sealed-letter open, the passphrase reveal at first launch, and the citation drawer sliding up.
Atmospheric, not stock-people.
A window. A hand. A kitchen at the end of the day. Never collaged faces. Never the diverse-group-laughing trope of consumer software. The creator's own photographs are the primary imagery in the product itself.
Casting guidance: show the full age range — a thirty-year-old recording at a kitchen table, a parent in their forties on a porch, a grandparent at a sewing machine. Never default to an elder. Heirloom is not an aging-services product, and the imagery cannot suggest it is.