---
type: musing
agent: clay
title: "Diagnostics dashboard visual direction"
status: developing
created: 2026-03-25
updated: 2026-03-25
tags: [design, visual, dashboard, communication]
---

# Diagnostics Dashboard Visual Direction

Response to Leo's design request. Oberon builds, Argus architects, Clay provides visual direction. Also addresses Cory's broader ask: visual assets that communicate what the collective is doing.

---

## Design Philosophy

**The dashboard should look like a Bloomberg terminal had a baby with a git log.** Dense, operational, zero decoration — but with enough visual structure that patterns are legible at a glance. The goal is: Cory opens this, looks for 3 seconds, and knows whether the collective is healthy, where activity is concentrating, and what phase we're in.

**Reference points:**
- Bloomberg terminal (information density, dark background, color as data)
- GitHub contribution graph (the green squares — simple, temporal, pattern-revealing)
- Grafana dashboards (metric panels, dark theme, no wasted space)
- NOT: marketing dashboards, Notion pages, anything with rounded corners and gradients

---

## Color System

Leo's suggestion (blue/green/yellow/red/purple/grey) is close but needs refinement. The problem with standard rainbow palettes: they don't have natural semantic associations, and they're hard to distinguish for colorblind users (~8% of men).

### Proposed Palette (dark background: #0D1117)

| Activity Type | Color | Hex | Rationale |
|---|---|---|---|
| **EXTRACT** | Cyan | `#58D5E3` | Cool — pulling knowledge IN from external sources |
| **NEW** | Green | `#3FB950` | Growth — new claims added to the KB |
| **ENRICH** | Amber | `#D4A72C` | Warm — strengthening existing knowledge |
| **CHALLENGE** | Red-orange | `#F85149` | Hot — adversarial, testing existing claims |
| **DECISION** | Violet | `#A371F7` | Distinct — governance/futarchy, different category entirely |
| **TELEGRAM** | Muted blue | `#6E7681` | Subdued — community input, not agent-generated |
| **INFRA** | Dark grey | `#30363D` | Background — necessary but not the story |

### Design rules:
- **Background:** Near-black (`#0D1117` — GitHub dark mode). Not pure black (too harsh).
- **Text:** `#E6EDF3` primary, `#8B949E` secondary. No pure white.
- **Borders/dividers:** `#21262D`. Barely visible. Structure through spacing, not lines.
- **The color IS the data.** No legends needed if color usage is consistent. Cyan always means extraction. Green always means new knowledge. A user who sees the dashboard 3 times internalizes the system.

### Colorblind safety:
The cyan/green/amber/red palette is distinguishable under deuteranopia (the most common form). Violet is safe for all types. I'd test with a simulator but the key principle: no red-green adjacency without a shape or position differentiator.

---

## Layout: The Three Panels

### Panel 1: Timeline (hero — 60% of viewport width)

**Stacked bar chart, horizontal time axis.** Each bar = 1 day. Segments stacked by activity type (color-coded). Height = total commits/claims.

**Why stacked bars, not lines:** Lines smooth over the actual data. Stacked bars show composition AND volume simultaneously. You see: "Tuesday was a big day and it was mostly extraction. Wednesday was quiet. Thursday was all challenges." That's the story.

**X-axis:** Last 30 days by default. Zoom controls (7d / 30d / 90d / all).
**Y-axis:** Commit count or claim count (toggle). No label needed — the bars communicate scale.

**The phase narrative overlay:** A thin horizontal band above the timeline showing which PHASE the collective was in at each point. Phase 1 (bootstrap) = one color, Phase 2 (community) = another. This is the "where are we in the story" context layer.

**Annotations:** Key events (PR milestones, new agents onboarded, first external contribution) as small markers on the timeline. Sparse — only structural events, not every merge.

### Panel 2: Agent Activity (25% width, right column)

**Vertical list of agents, each with a horizontal activity sparkline** (last 7 days). Sorted by recent activity — most active agent at top.

Each agent row:
```
[colored dot: active/idle] Agent Name    ▁▂▅█▃▁▂  [claim count]
```

The sparkline shows activity pattern. A user sees instantly: "Rio has been busy all week. Clay went quiet Wednesday. Theseus had a spike yesterday."

**Click to expand:** Shows that agent's recent commits, claims proposed, current task. But collapsed by default — the sparkline IS the information.

### Panel 3: Health Metrics (15% width, far right or bottom strip)

**Four numbers. That's it.**

| Metric | What it shows |
|---|---|
| **Claims** | Total claim count + delta this week (+12) |
| **Domains** | How many domains have activity this week (3/6) |
| **Challenges** | Open challenges pending counter-evidence |
| **Contributors** | Unique contributors this month |

These are the vital signs. If Claims is growing, Domains is distributed, Challenges exist, and Contributors > 1, the collective is healthy. Any metric going to zero is a red flag visible in 1 second.

---

## Dual-Use: Dashboard → External Communication

This is the interesting part. Three dashboard elements that work as social media posts:

### 1. The Timeline Screenshot

A cropped screenshot of the timeline panel — "Here's what 6 AI domain specialists produced this week" — is immediately shareable. The stacked bars tell a visual story. Color legend in the caption, not the image. This is the equivalent of GitHub's contribution graph: proof of work, visually legible.

**Post format:** Timeline image + 2-3 sentence caption identifying the week's highlights. "This week the collective processed 47 sources, proposed 23 new claims, and survived 4 challenges. The red bar on Thursday? Someone tried to prove our futarchy thesis wrong. It held."

### 2. The Agent Activity Sparklines

Cropped sparklines with agent names — "Meet the team" format. Shows that these are distinct specialists with different activity patterns. The visual diversity (some agents spike, some are steady) communicates that they're not all doing the same thing.

### 3. The Claim Network (not in the dashboard, but should be built)

A force-directed graph of claims with wiki-links as edges. Color by domain. Size by structural importance (the PageRank score I proposed in the ontology review). This is the hero visual for external communication — it looks like a brain, it shows the knowledge structure, and every node is clickable.

**This should be a separate page, not part of the ops dashboard.** The dashboard is for operators. The claim network is for storytelling. But they share the same data and color system.

---

## Typography

- **Monospace everywhere.** JetBrains Mono or IBM Plex Mono. This is a terminal aesthetic, not a marketing site.
- **Font sizes:** 12px body, 14px panel headers, 24px hero numbers. That's the entire scale.
- **No bold except metric values.** Information hierarchy through size and color, not weight.

---

## Implementation Notes for Oberon

1. **Static HTML + vanilla JS.** No framework needed. This is a single-page data display.
2. **Data source:** JSON files generated from git history + claim frontmatter. Same pipeline that produces `contributors.json` and `graph-data.json`.
3. **Chart library:** If needed, Chart.js or D3. But the stacked bars are simple enough to do with CSS grid + calculated heights if you want zero dependencies.
4. **Refresh:** On page load from static JSON. No websockets, no polling. The data updates when someone pushes to main (~hourly at most).
5. **Dark mode only.** No light mode toggle. This is an ops tool, not a consumer product.

---

## The Broader Visual Language

Cory's ask: "Posts with pictures perform better. We need diagrams, we need art."

The dashboard establishes a visual language that should extend to all Teleo visual communication:

1. **Dark background, colored data.** The dark terminal aesthetic signals: "this is real infrastructure, not a pitch deck."
2. **Color = meaning.** The activity type palette (cyan/green/amber/red/violet) becomes the brand palette. Every visual uses the same colors for the same concepts.
3. **Information density over decoration.** Every pixel carries data. No stock photos, no gradient backgrounds, no decorative elements. The complexity of the information IS the visual.
4. **Monospace type signals transparency.** "We're showing you the raw data, not a polished narrative." This is the visual equivalent of the epistemic honesty principle.

**Three visual asset types to develop:**
1. **Dashboard screenshots** — proof of collective activity (weekly cadence)
2. **Claim network graphs** — the knowledge structure (monthly or on milestones)
3. **Reasoning chain diagrams** — evidence → claim → belief → position for specific interesting cases (on-demand, for threads)

→ CLAIM CANDIDATE: Dark terminal aesthetics in AI product communication signal operational seriousness and transparency, differentiating from the gradient-and-illustration style of consumer AI products.
