The position

Design is increasingly generated, and the hand is no longer the bottleneck. The sentence is. A model can produce thirty layouts in a minute; choosing among them, and saying what is wrong with the other twenty-nine, still takes words. Wording exists to sharpen those words. If you can’t name it, you can’t direct it.

Why it matters

A word is leverage. The moment a team can say “the easing is too linear” or “the counter is too tight” instead of “make it feel nicer,” the work becomes directable: you can critique it, hand it off, agree or disagree about it. Vocabulary is what turns a private eye for craft into something a group can practice together. Most design feedback dies in the gap between seeing a fault and naming it. This dictionary is an attempt to close that gap.

Why a dictionary

The form is the argument. A glossary insists that each idea is small enough to define, ordered enough to find, and stable enough to point at twice. It refuses the essay’s luxury of vagueness. If a term here cannot earn one clear sentence and, where it helps, one still figure, it does not belong. Precision is not the decoration of the work. It is the work.

Influences

Wording stands on writing better than its own.

• Emil Kowalski on motion: the clearest case that animation is judgment, not garnish.
• Rauno Freiberg’s craft notes: proof that the invisible details are the design.
• Design Engineering at Vercel: the discipline this dictionary hands words to.
• Dieter Rams’ ten principles: “less, but better” is this site’s editorial policy.
• Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style: the book every type term here is afraid of disappointing.

Hello

I’m Rene Wang, a design engineer who kept reaching for words that weren’t there yet. I built Wording for myself first: a place to pin down the terms I use to argue about interfaces, so the arguments could get sharper. If a definition is wrong, a term is missing, or you just want to talk shop, write to me at contact@rene.wang. I’d genuinely like to hear it.