Echolot is the German word for an echo sounder — an instrument that emits
a ping and reads what comes back — and the UI now looks like one instead
of like a dashboard. The three big-number stat cards went first: that
layout is the stock answer for any admin page, and it told a network
engineer nothing they could act on.
Palette is a water column rather than a neutral near-black, with a
desaturated sea-green return for the accent. Verdict colours come from
the domain, so they carry meaning rather than decorate. No web fonts —
the CSP forbids loading anything and shipping font files would trade
what makes this a single pleasant binary for a typeface — so the
character comes from treatment: machine-set headings, tracked small
caps, hairlines.
The one ornament is a trace of returns across time on the runs page, one
bar per run coloured by verdict, oldest to newest. It is real data, pure
CSS, and it is what an echo sounder actually draws.
The mobile fix is the same idea rather than a fallback. Tables become
label-and-value records with dotted leaders, which is how a sounding log
prints and is easier to read on a phone than any table that scrolls
sideways. Above 46rem every row shares one grid so the columns agree by
construction; the first attempt used table-cell and each row wrapped
independently, which produces a table that does not align — a list
paying for borders.
Found by rendering it rather than reading the CSS: the trace stranded
itself against the right edge when runs were few, "Open run" broke across
two lines, equal columns wrapped device names while a one-digit count
kept a quarter of the row, and the sign-in page carried no wordmark at
all, so you arrived somewhere that never said what it was.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
