Every direction below is the same instrument on the same live numbers — the Tape's books, its trades, its cohort. Only the design differs. This page exists because the house style has not been chosen yet, and a choice needs the options side by side rather than a description of them.
Each panel below is the live page. Open any of them full size.
Reply with the names you want and the names you refuse. Both are useful — a refusal is a boundary.
The winner is applied across the operator apps, and the house palette is set from it. Nothing here is final until you say so.
The desk's own language. Bloomberg function bar, monospaced, colour only where it signs a number.
Good: Density without clutter — everything on one line, nothing decorative.
Costs: Monospace all day tires the eye. Any prose we ever write will read wrong in it.
Open full size →IBM Carbon: white, zero radius, an 8px grid, exactly one blue.
Good: Institutional and unshowy. Tables stay legible at any width, and nothing competes for attention.
Costs: Deliberately cold. It will never feel like ours rather than anyone's.
Open full size →A settled paper ledger. Serif, numbered docket, the look of something filed and signed.
Good: The most serious of the eight. Says the numbers were checked.
Costs: Serif at density is slower to scan, and the docket is slow to change.
Open full size →One screen, one card, one enormous figure.
Good: The strongest single read in the set. You cannot miss the number.
Costs: It says almost nothing. No comparison, no history, no context — the opposite of an instrument.
Open full size →Broadsheet. Serif headline, columns, colour only on the P&L numbers.
Good: Editorial and authoritative. It reads like something with an opinion and a byline.
Costs: Columns do not survive a phone, and the house apps are read on phones.
Open full size →A trading floor in 1979. One green phosphor, scanlines, a blinking caret.
Good: Unmistakable and atmospheric. Nobody else ships this.
Costs: The effect IS the design. There is almost no room to add anything to it, ever.
Open full size →A modern chunky app. Rounded panels, geometric display type, one saturated orange.
Good: Friendly and contemporary. Comfortable, approachable, easy to extend.
Costs: The least distinctive of the eight, and the closest to what every AI app already looks like.
Open full size →An intelligence dossier. Quiet, procedural, evidence first.
Good: The most restrained. It never oversells, and it puts the caveat next to the claim.
Costs: Restrained can read as plain. Less character than the others.
Open full size →