Users
Crypto-native DeFi participants who actively monitor stablecoin health — checking market conditions, peg stability, and risk signals regularly to inform financial decisions. The core audience is power-user-leaning: they value density, precision, and speed-to-insight over softness or consumer-app hand-holding.
Discovery and onboarding surfaces (/start/, first-run callouts, /about/, /api/ public landing, /learn/mechanisms/) deliberately soften their layout and lead with warmer kicker copy to welcome newcomers, but the data surfaces they hand off to stay practitioner-grade. The drift is in the funnel, not in the product core.
Brand Personality
Vigilant, precise, distinctive. Pharos is a lighthouse — it watches every peg so you don't have to. The tone is practitioner-built, not corporate, and the product should feel unmistakable rather than merely competent. It earns trust through completeness and specificity, but it should also carry a unique vibe that separates it from generic analytics dashboards.
Emotional Design
Calm by default, urgent when needed. The steady state is composed and analytical — the user feels informed and in control. When risk signals fire (depeg events, DEWS alerts, PSI band shifts), the interface shifts tone to communicate urgency without panic.
Surface Tiers
Pharos calibrates density and tone to surface intent across three explicit tiers. Use this table to place new work; do not blend tiers within a single surface.
| Tier | Routes / Surfaces | Density | Tone | Layout signal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Discovery | /start/, homepage page-discovery module, /about/, /api/ public landing, /learn/mechanisms/, marketing-adjacent shells | Lowest | Warmer kicker copy permitted; inviting framing (e.g., "Chart your route") | Larger rounded shells, generous whitespace, fewer controls, step explainers, route boards |
| Analytics | Homepage dashboard, /depeg/, /chains/, /liquidity/, /freezewatch/, /yield/, /coverage/, /alt-pegs/, /safety-scores/, /upcoming/, /digest/ archive | Default | Composed, analytical, factual | pharos-card-shell, KPI grids, charts, sortable tables, control pills |
| Power-user | /stablecoin/[id]/, /compare/, /screener/, /timeline/, /portfolio/, ops admin | Highest | Maximum information per pixel; assumes domain fluency | Dense tables, minimal chrome, hairline dividers, mono-heavy, multi-pane composition |
The gradient runs Discovery → Analytics → Power-user. Drift between adjacent tiers is acceptable when justified by the surface's actual user intent; jumps across tiers (warm copy on /timeline/, marketing-style soft chrome on /screener/, or dense multi-pane composition inside /start/) are not.
Aesthetic Direction
- Theme: Light theme by default, with the same dense financial-dashboard hierarchy preserved in dark mode
- References: DeFi-native research products with strong data density and practical crypto analytics, but Pharos should not collapse into looking like another interchangeable dashboard
- Brand accent: Frost-blue
oklch(0.72 0.14 248)— used sparingly for navigation active states and brand touches - Fonts: Geist Sans (UI) + Geist Mono (all numbers) — monospace numbers signal precision and trust. Three intentional non-Geist carve-outs: Newsreader serif (Daily Digest editorial), Georgia serif (
AiSummaryparagraph on stablecoin detail), Courier New + Geist Mono (Tape //timeline/wire-service stream) - Color use: Semantic first — color communicates state (health, risk, trend direction), not empty decoration
- Design bar: Avoid generic SaaS sameness; every major surface should feel authored and recognizably Pharos
Anti-References (what Pharos must NOT look like)
- Web3 marketing pages: Purple gradients, glassmorphism, buzzword-heavy, style over substance
- Corporate fintech: Sterile, over-polished, feels like a bank app — no personality
- Generic SaaS dashboards: Cookie-cutter admin panels with big empty cards, interchangeable KPI tiles, and safe pastel gradients
- Derivative crypto analytics clones: Anything that feels like a reskinned DefiLlama or generic trading terminal without its own point of view
- Consumer-app over-softening: Discovery surfaces soften their layout and kicker copy, not their data. Charts, tables, and numbers stay analytical on every tier — no chunky illustrations or onboarding mascots inside data surfaces.
Design Principles
- Data density over decoration — every pixel earns its place by communicating information
- Calibrate density to surface intent — Discovery surfaces breathe and lead with warmer kicker copy; Analytics surfaces hold the default; Power-user surfaces compress. Do not apply a single density everywhere.
- Calm authority, not loud urgency — steady state is composed; risk signals shift the tone
- Precision as personality — monospace numbers, exact percentages, named bands — trust through specificity
- Semantic color only — color communicates state (health, risk, trend), never decoration
- Soften the funnel, not the product — onboarding and discovery can welcome with warmer language and roomier layouts; data surfaces remain crypto-native and practitioner-grade
- Distinctive, not generic — Pharos should feel authored and memorable, never like a template or a clone. When a page introduces a metaphor, draw it (Cemetery, Alt-Peg Atlas, Chains Harbor) — but every shape must encode a data field
- Consistency is polish — premium feel comes from repeated precision in spacing, shell treatment, controls, and empty/error states, not from adding decorative novelty