A Bloomberg terminal designed by an art director.
When we started designing Veluxa, the brief we wrote ourselves was exactly one sentence:
A Bloomberg terminal designed by an art director.
That's the whole thing. Every design decision we've made since then has been downstream of unpacking that sentence.
What we took from Bloomberg
The first half of the brief — Bloomberg terminal — is about density.
Bloomberg's UI is famously ugly. But it is also famously the tool that professionals in one of the highest-stakes, highest-paid industries on earth pay $24kper year to use. Not because the terminal is the only way to get market data — it isn't — but because it packs more information per pixel than any consumer product will ever tolerate.
We noticed something specific: the people who run communities for a living are doing Bloomberg-grade work. They are tracking dozens of KPIs, moderating hundreds of messages a day, shipping on tight cadences, managing seven-figure budgets. Their tools look like Instagram.
That's a mismatch. Their tools should feel like the Bloomberg terminal.
So we made the following choices:
- ·Borders, not shadows. Shadows blur relationships. Borders make them precise.
- ·Sharp corners, not rounded. Rounded corners soften. Soft isn't what we're optimizing for.
- ·Dense KPI grids on the overview. Four numbers in one row, not one number stretched across a card.
- ·Tabular numerals everywhere. Every stat, every time, every count uses JetBrains Mono with
font-feature-settings: "tnum". Numbers align. Comparisons are instant.
What we took from the art director
The second half — designed by an art director — is about editorial warmth.
Bloomberg alone is sterile. It's functional, but it's not a pleasure to look at. We wanted Veluxa to be both. So we went hunting for things an art director would insist on.
- ·Display type. We picked Fraunces in its italic, 400-weight setting for every headline. Fraunces has a warm, magazine quality — it feels like the copy deck of a literary journal, not the inside of a bank.
- ·One accent color. Our amber (
#E9B949) appears only as a highlight — on CTAs, on a section's eyebrow, on a selected tab border. It never fills a background the size of a button group. Color restraint is what separates editorial from consumer. - ·Platform colors used only for platform identity. Telegram blue (
#229ED9) and WhatsApp green (#25D366) appear on source rows and on the filter chips that identify those platforms. They never appear on CTAs, headings, or decorations. Meaning survives. - ·Warm cream text, not white.
#F5F1E8is our body color. True white feels clinical against a near-black background. Cream feels like paper.
The one design decision we argue about most
Borders. Specifically, border opacity and border weight.
Our first iteration had 1px solid borders at full opacity. It read as a grid of boxes. Too much structure.
Our second iteration had 1px solid borders at 50% opacity. It read as too timid. Borders should feel like a commitment.
Our third and current iteration has 1px solid borders at full opacity but in a specific tone — #26262E — that sits about 10% above the surface color and is just visible enough to define without dominating. We test new borders by squinting at the screen from six feet away. If you can still see every border, they're too strong. If you can see none, they're too weak. We're calibrated.
The hardest thing to get right
Editorial doesn't mean minimal. It means intentional.
The temptation in 2026 SaaS design is to strip out ornament until nothing is left. A single bold headline, a single accent color, a single CTA. That produces a product that looks like a landing page, but falls apart the moment you load real data into it.
Editorial design, by contrast, is comfortable with density. Magazines put five articles on a single page and you still know where to look first because the hierarchy is clear — through size, weight, color, rule, whitespace, typeface.
Veluxa is a magazine in software form. Every surface has a point of view. Every section has a hierarchy. The density scales with the stakes.
Principles (for anyone building editorial software)
- ·Pick one display font and use it with conviction. Italics for emphasis, not bold.
- ·Pick one accent color. Use it on under 5% of the pixels.
- ·Use borders to define relationships. Use weight and size to signal hierarchy. Not color.
- ·Use tabular numerals for every number. The number 1 should be the same width as the number 8.
- ·Don't use shadows, gradients, or rounded corners unless they serve a specific editorial purpose. The default should be none.
- ·Density is a feature, not a bug. Your users pay for it.
We've made all of these mistakes at various points. The product you use today is the one that survived iteration. The next one will be better.
The brief still holds.