Brand
The filament does not close. It is a line that keeps drawing and never joins up — the way a lamp that is still awake ought to look.
Mark
The filament does not close. That line keeps drawing and never joins up — the way a lamp that is still awake ought to look. Printed on a circuit board, cut into metal, shrunk to an app icon, it is the same shape every time.
Notes
Not a manual — the handful of decisions that reality overruled while it was being built. They are here because they say more about why the device looks the way it does than the specification does.
First find out what the panel can do: a pixel is either ink or paper, there are four type sizes, and a refresh takes a moment. Once those three lines are on paper, "what kind of device should this be" has an answer. The other order is to design the features first and discover afterwards that the panel cannot do them.
Transitions and swipe feedback were the plan. The first refresh took close to half a second, and for that half second the screen is scrambled. So all of it went. What is left is clearer: a switch is a switch, and it does not have to announce that it is switching.
Removing one means answering the same question every time: is this answering a question anyone actually has? If not, it goes. Taking buttons away is far harder than adding them, and worth much more.
The light comes from the room. So a dark interface only earns its keep once it is actually dark, and the default has to be light. That was missed at first; it became obvious the first time the panel was picked up at noon.
An interface half in Chinese and half in English is worse than one entirely in Chinese. A string that will not translate either gets cut or gets owned — but it does not get left half-done.
Every claim on this site has to match the object in your hand. Known limitations get their own section, listing what still does not work. Written down beats hidden: you should know before it arrives, not after.
Palette
These six values are the entire brand. There is no second palette on this site, and no hex value may be written anywhere else.
Type
Chinese body text is set in an open-source regular script, the same face the device ships in its factory font — so the site and the device are the same Chinese. It was chosen because hairlines and serifs close up into a smudge on e-ink, while a regular script keeps its strokes even at 12 px.
