01 — about
← here is where it gets good

hi, I'm the about section, let me show you around. desca.works is a tiny atelier obsessed with one boring, beautiful thing — writing the words next to the buttons. The microcopy. The empty states. The tooltips nobody reads. The descriptions that actually do their job.

we built this because we kept losing track of which descriptions actually worked, which ones got skimmed, which ones turned a curious tap into a converted scroll. so we made a desk for that work — literal, paper, ink, scissors — and called it desca.works.

the studio is two writers, one editor, and a googly eye that tracks your cursor in the next room. we work slowly. we ship descriptions you remember.

p.s. if you're skimming, that's fine — we wrote it to survive a skim.

02 — works
look! recent receipts ↓

hi, I'm works. these are the desks we've leaned on lately. each one is a description problem dressed up as a product brief.

a banking app that stopped scaring people

we rewrote 184 error states. "transaction failed" became "the bank said no — here's why." support tickets dropped 31%, and that number is real, not a stat block.

2025 · microcopy · 6-week residency

an empty state for a very full inbox

the brief was: "make zero feel like a reward." we wrote a single line and drew a tape strip behind it. the line was "that's the whole inbox. go outside."

2025 · empty states · single-line job

a tooltip that earned its hover

three sentences, written and re-written 22 times. survived two product redesigns. still living quietly above a checkbox in a settings page nobody opens.

2024 · tooltip · longest-loved sentence

p.s. yes, the eye is watching you. it's friendly. say hi.

03 — process
how the sausage gets edited ✎

hi, I'm process. there's not much glamour here — but there's a method, and it survives most Mondays.

  1. read the room. we sit with the product for a week before writing a single word. we use the buttons. we hit the errors. we get bored on purpose.
  2. map the tone. we sketch a tone gradient on actual paper — left side cold and clinical, right side warm and chatty — and pin it to the wall. every screen gets a coordinate.
  3. write fast, then slow. first pass is in 40 minutes, no editing. second pass is in two days, with a sharp pencil. third pass is read aloud to a colleague, who's allowed to wince.
  4. test where it lives. copy never sits in a doc — it always gets pasted into the actual UI before it's signed off. fonts matter. line breaks matter. caps lock matters most of all.
  5. re-read in a year. every project ships with a calendar reminder. we come back, we read what we wrote, we re-write the parts that aged badly. descriptions decay; we patch them.
"a description is never finished. it just gets handed off to the next reader."

none of this is unique. all of it is honest. we charge by the desk-day, not by the word, because the words are the cheapest part.

p.s. the calendar reminder is real. ours is set for the third Tuesday of every quarter.

04 — index
contents — three columns, dense ✦

things we love

  • error messages that apologize
  • empty states with jokes
  • buttons that say what happens
  • tooltips written like text messages
  • 404 pages with a map back
  • onboarding that ends
  • confirmation dialogs that mean it
  • copy that survives translation

things we won't write

  • "we value your privacy"
  • "oops, something went wrong"
  • "please try again later"
  • "you have been logged out"
  • "are you sure?" without context
  • "learn more →" without a destination
  • "powered by ___"
  • fake urgency timers

desks we've leaned on

  • a wood desk in lisbon, 2023
  • a folding desk in berlin, 2024
  • a kitchen counter, august
  • a window ledge, february
  • a hotel desk, briefly
  • the floor, twice
  • a borrowed café table, often
  • this desk, right now

p.s. the floor counts. some sentences only happen on the floor.

05 — say hi
the kettle is on ☕

hi, I'm the last section. that's the whole site. no pricing, no signup, no popup. just a desk and an address.

if you have a description that isn't pulling its weight — a setting nobody understands, a button that scares people, an empty state begging for a sentence — send it over. we'll read it tonight, write back tomorrow, and quote you by the desk-day.

if you don't have a description but you do have a question, that's also fine. we like questions. we read every single email and we reply in plain words.

p.s. if you got this far, you read 1,800 words on a Tuesday. that's a great start.