Design Lab

A real type scale, mono+caps reserved for labels, and a Comfortable / Compact density toggle.

Title-led cards with a quiet metadata strip. Promoted breaking-cluster badge for stories carried by multiple outlets.

A '?' shortcut overlay, first-run tour, and proper empty states so a new user is never staring at a wall of acronyms.

Slide-in settings grouping theme, voice, watch keywords, density. Visual-only Pro lock badges to set up the paid-tier story.

All ideas wired together as a single mock dashboard you can compare against the live one tab-over.

Five candidate homes for the auth/profile pill: header right, header left, footer between briefing controls, footer right, sidebar top. Anon and Pro states for each.

Three header consolidation variants that make room for the operator pill without adding to the existing element density. Stats-pill collapse, sync-tooltip, and minimalist + gear-dropdown approaches.

Interactive preview of the mobile dashboard: trimmed 56px header, full-screen 3D globe, 3-stop bottom sheet (peek / middle / expanded), filter drawer, broadcasting state, settings sheet. The reference scaffold the live mobile shell mirrors. Open on a phone for the real-device variant.

Five mobile problems found by driving the live dashboard at 360–390px, each with a Now-vs-Proposed device mock: header brand wrapping at narrow widths, the bottom-sheet peek leaking clipped tabs/search, the legal footer pinned over the sheet, desktop-only dismissal language in Settings, and tapping an article giving no visible feedback. Every fix is chrome-only — globe untouched. Header + Settings-dismissal + footer shipped; the rest carry into round 2.

Iteration board after the round-1 review: calmer bottom-sheet peek variants, regrouped control-row designs (the BRIEF/VOICE/OPERATOR/sync/PULL-FEEDS strip), explicit drag-bar affordances (chevron / pull-tab / feed FAB), and a batch of new mobile ideas (filter chips, pull-to-refresh, pin→detail-sheet, landscape split). Comparison mocks with a recommendation per group — pick the winners to ship.

Eight pin rendering strategies side-by-side with live FPS / draw-call / geometry counters: baseline multi-mesh, simple sphere, InstancedMesh, sprite billboards, Points cloud, 3D pin model, instanced-with-pulse, and instanced + story-group connection lines. Each tagged 'best for: mobile / desktop / both' with reasoning. Diagnostic + decision tool for the mobile context-loss fix.

Curiosity preview: what the right-rail panel looks like with the Analyst tab default-selected instead of the deterministic Feed. Live behaviour unchanged — production keeps Feed as the default. Mounts the real AnalystFeed component against /api/analyst-feed.

Bare-bones Three.js scene plus a ?step=N ladder (0-13) covering everything the live globe mounts: atmosphere, borders, graticule, orbital reticle, stars, animated clouds, city lights, sun flare, aurora, LIVE DATA pins (USGS quakes + ISS + storms), real lighting, Lambert + normal map, full PBR. Step 0 confirmed contextLossCount=0 on the cycling device — the goal is to find the lowest step that breaks. Open with ?cc_debug=1 for telemetry that streams to Railway logs.