make it real.I work alone, mostly in Illustrator and Premiere, with one hand on the mouse and one on the keyboard. Every question I had for an assistant meant leaving the file, typing into a chat window, and finding my place again.
The assistants available to me were all chat windows.
I named her etta. The wordmark is set lowercase in gray, #BABABA, with a pink period, #EE2C7A. The period is the signature. It grows into the app icon, a pink circle with the wordmark across it, and into the orb that sits on my screen.
Her replies appear word by word in a near-black box, #050505, with the phrase that matters set in pink. Her chime is two soft felt taps I synthesized from scratch. Her voice is locked to one ElevenLabs voice with a fixed seed, so she sounds the same every time.
Every state of the orb is built from flat pink dots. At rest they gather into the logo. When she listens they split into a wave that rises with my voice. When she thinks they orbit. When she talks they merge into one circle that swells on each syllable.
The same dots form shapes when a shape says it faster: a check when something is done, a number, a clock for a timer. They fan out from the center, hold, and gather back into the logo.
I say "Hey Etta" and a request. She transcribes on the Mac with Whisper, answers through Claude, and speaks. When she finishes, I can reply for a few seconds without the wake word. "Look at this" gives her a screenshot of what I'm working on. She keeps a memory file, rewritten each morning from the day before.
She lives in the menu bar, with a today briefing, the day's history, and a setup page for her permissions. She never touches my terminal sessions. She won't send a text or an email until I say "send it."
| Decision | Outcome |
|---|---|
| The pink period as the signature | One mark runs through the wordmark, the icon, the orb, and the point of every reply. |
| Dots for every state | Idle, listening, thinking, and talking are one system, so each change reads as the same object moving. |
| One locked voice | A fixed model, settings, and seed. She never drifts between takes. |
| Confirm before sending | Nothing leaves as a text or an email until I have heard it read back. |
etta runs on my Mac. I had her icon open in Illustrator and asked her to look. She told me to move the mark into the rounded square and drop the gray, because gray on pink reads muddy.
The send rule exists because she texted my brother on a voice request before I had confirmed it.
I designed the name, the wordmark, the icon, the motion, the sound, and the interface. I built the product they live in, in code, directed through Claude Code. Every identity decision was tested inside a working app the same day it was made.