News Reader

Tone

Editorial, authoritative, typographically-driven, and distraction-free — the quiet confidence of a broadsheet newspaper translated to glass

Target audience

Information-conscious professionals aged 28-45 who read The Economist, Hacker News, or use Feedly — people who value signal over noise and treat reading as a deliberate practice, not passive scrolling

Design direction

Digest looks and feels like a broadsheet newspaper printed on near-black recycled stock. The background is not pure black — it's an ink-stained near-black (#0F0F0D) with a faint warm undertone, as if the screen itself has absorbed years of newsprint. Headlines are set in Source Serif 4, rendered in near-white (#F5F4EF) — not blinding white, but the warm white of aged paper held under a reading lamp. The singular accent color is a deep amber-gold (#F0A500) — the color of a whisky glass, of a brass desk lamp, of a highlighted sentence in a physical book. It appears precisely and only where it matters: active category tabs, bookmark icons, category labels, pull quote borders. Nothing else earns that color. Cards have no shadows, no rounded corners beyond 6px, no images — just type, hierarchy, and breathing room. The typographic scale is aggressive: feed headlines run at 20–22px serif with tight leading, creating the dense-but-legible texture of a newspaper column. Metadata (source, time, category) is set in Inter at 11–12px with generous letter-spacing, subordinate but crisp. Dividers are hairlines at 0.5px, barely visible — structure implied, not imposed. The overall feeling is one of earned authority: this app has nothing to prove, nothing to sell, and nowhere to rush.

Color palette

Typography

Headings: Source Serif 4 · Body: Inter

Design inspiration

The Economist app — rigorous editorial hierarchy, restrained color, text-first philosophy, Instapaper — obsessive reading experience, generous whitespace, zero chrome, Artifact (RIP) — intelligent curation, clean card architecture, respect for the reader's attention