RIGEL · DESIGN LANGUAGE
The pixels don’t move. The light flows through them.
Compass reads like a datasheet and moves like a well-made machine: bright-on-dark, monospaced, staged. Retro-computing honesty dialled to ten percent, never a hundred. Here is the system behind it.
One accent, one motion
Restraint is the brand. The palette is Night Owl — a deep navy ground with a bright fog for text. Purple is the one colour accent, and it appears on exactly one thing: the mark. Working state is green, done is cyan, waiting is amber — purple is never a state colour.
- Night Owl ground
- Deep navy surfaces, fog text. High contrast without the harshness of pure black on white — every value earns its place.
- Purple is the mark
- The one colour accent, used only on the counter-star R. Everywhere else the interface is calm greys, blues, and greens.
- Phosphor pulse
- One motion accent — a phosphor glow on lit and loading elements. The way purple is the one colour, the pulse is the one flourish.
One primitive, many topologies
The whole motion system is a single idea: a lit segment travelling a fixed track. Discrete cells light in sequence; persistence of vision fuses them into directional flow. The cells never move — only the light does. Unrolled onto an open line it reads as a progress bar; wrapped, it becomes a ring, a spinner, a grid ripple.
Bitmap-native
1-bit cells, hard ON or OFF on a coarse grid. The chunkiness is not a filter over a smooth design — it is the design. Display type is Departure Mono, a true bitmap face laid on an 11-pixel grid; body is Space Mono. Kept on-grid and off composited layers, it renders razor-crisp at any display scaling — the coarseness is deliberate, never accidental blur.
The system, in the product
The palette, the one accent, and the single motion primitive are how Compass looks and moves. See them at work in the product.