The Radar Paradox

License Radar’s visual identity wasn’t designed. It was discovered.

The Iterations

Synthwave phase

Synthwave. Neon cyan, magenta, glow effects. Fun. Fatiguing. Gone.

Terracotta phase

Terracotta. Notion vibes. Felt like a project management tool. Wrong personality.

Transitional phase

Zinc + vivid green. Green from 60s phosphorus radar displays. Right direction. But vivid green on muted backgrounds — half the UI screaming, half whispering.

Subtraction

The fix wasn’t additive. Bulk transformation across 30 files. Pulled saturation out of everything. Vivid green (#22c55e) became forest (#3d7a5c). Fire-engine red became brick. Yellow became antique gold.

The brand’s green wasn’t chosen. It’s what #22c55e became after desaturation. It survived the churn.

Monitoring tools should feel like cockpit instruments. Always on, always readable, never demanding attention until something matters. Neon screams. Muted tones observe.

License Radar - Current

The Reveal

Brainstorming with Claude. Trying to solve logo hover state. Background highlight — too heavy. Stripped to opacity fade. Then: what if the whole navbar did that?

Then: what if hovering made the logo come alive in green AND revealed a hidden dashboard icon? Icon already in the DOM at zero opacity. Invisible until the radar detects it.

Radar reveals what’s hidden. The thing was always there. The radar just showed it to you.

Extended everywhere. Cards with details that fade in on hover. Stale data that gradually reduces opacity. Alerts that blip once and fade rather than persist as badges.

Designed vs. Discovered

The logo reveal is too perfect to be intentional. Nobody said “encode the product metaphor into a CSS hover state.” It emerged from solving a different problem.

But every prior decision created conditions for it. The name. The palette iterations. Removing the Dashboard button. The opacity experiments. Each constraint narrowed the space until one answer remained.

“Designed” and “discovered” aren’t opposites. Best design feels like removing everything that isn’t the answer. The sculpture was already in the marble.

From the License Radar devlog.