sisu.
/ˈsisu/ · grit, stubborn resolve
the working one. built for a dashboard somebody has open for eight hours.
the word
sisu /ˈsisu/ (grit, stubborn resolve). not courage in the moment but what keeps going after the courage runs out. the part that shows up when there is nothing left to draw on.
endurance is not a mood, it is what remains once the mood has gone. the register that has to survive an eight hour session cannot afford to be admired.
sisu came out of a browser extension and its landing page: real product surface, lists and toolbars and panels and counts. the palette pulls the accents back and pushes the borders forward, because a working screen is structured by its edges, not by its colour.
the ground
every theme speaks the same role vocabulary. these six are the ones doing the heavy lifting in sisu.
bga cooler dark, less saturated than kajosurfacepanels and cards, clearly separatedaccentused sparingly, mostly on the one live controlborderload-bearing here. structure comes from edgesmutedsecondary text and every unit, still AAdangera status colour that has to be read, not felt
the surface
a deploy console assembled from the catalog: Badge, Button, Chip, ProgressRow, StatCard and the mono scale, structured by its edges.
- 14:02:11apibuild #482 green in 41s
- 14:02:36edgecanary at 5% of traffic
- 14:03:04apip95 latency 118ms, holding
- 14:03:12workerretry queue draining, 1.2k left
- 14:03:40webassets purged from 14 edges
the timing
snappy and critically damped. short durations, no overshoot. an interface you use a hundred times a day must not perform for you on the hundredth.
fasthover, pressbasemost transitionsslowentrancesambientatmosphere driftuse it for
- a dashboard somebody keeps open all day
- dense tables and toolbars and logs
- long sessions where boring is the feature
not for
- a landing page selling something in one scroll
- a sula element inside a data region
- showing off
you are standing in sisu right now, and every page on this site renders in it, this one included. that is range, not a recommendation. it carries all of this without being built for any of it, and what it is built for is the other list.
the other registers
same components, same roles, a different reading of every one of them. nothing forks.