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contentVercel

Ampersand in Tight Space

SHOULD

SHOULD: Use `&` instead of "and" in width-constrained labels (sidebar items, tabs, table headers) so compound labels like "Billing & Invoices" stay on one line; keep "and" in prose.

Prefer "&" over "and" in labels where horizontal space is constrained

Bad

Good

Why it matters

Sidebar items, tabs, and table headers have a hard width budget, and "and" spends three characters plus two spaces on a word that carries no meaning the ampersand does not. Swapping it keeps compound labels like "Billing & Invoices" on one line instead of truncating them mid-word or wrapping the row. Keep "and" in prose, where space is not the constraint.

References

Built by Gleb Stroganov, design engineer at Evil Martians.

The rules come from other people's skills and guidelines — Vercel, Rauno Freiberg, @Ibelick, impeccable, Emil Kowalski, Tailwind, RAMS — each one credited on the Sources page. The work here is extraction and wiring: every rule is pulled into one corpus, given a good and a bad example you can operate, a MUST/SHOULD/NEVER rule an agent can paste, and a link back to where it came from.