Two registers: an editorial landing page, a clinical terminal

nilo is our own production for a category in which almost every interface shouts: crypto trading platforms work with neon green, countdown pressure and maximum information density — and hide the risk exactly where it blinks loudest.

We wanted to build the opposite: a working environment for considered execution, in which the risk position is visible and the colour suggests no emotion. The claim could only be proven by building both the brand and the actual product.

The most conspicuous decision is in the colour system: long is not green. The buy and sell sides both sit on muted tones — a lilac for the buy side, a restrained red for the sell side. That removes from the interface exactly the reflex trading platforms otherwise trigger on purpose.

Typographically two worlds are set against each other: an italic-capable serif used only for large statements, a dense grotesque at a 13-pixel base size for the whole application. The contrast carries the two registers — landing page editorial, terminal clinical.

The landing page does not show a screenshot of a product, it shows the product: the hero embeds the real terminal route in a desktop frame and a phone frame. What runs on the home page is the application itself.

The home page is structured as hero, features, transparency, community and closing CTA, joined by smooth scrolling and continuous grid lines. The background is a hand-built ASCII wave field on canvas: mouse-led, with up to four simultaneous click waves and an optimisation documented in the code — pre-rendered character strips, block-wise drawing, lookup tables for trigonometry and distance, an upper bound on the cell count and a fixed frame-rate budget.

The terminal is a fixed screen shell: a header with the trading pair, a candlestick chart with a volume histogram, an order book with sixteen levels per side whose spread opens outwards, whose depth bars are drawn through a CSS variable and whose rows flash briefly on a price change. Next to it an order form with buy and sell sides, three order types, margin modes, percentage steps, reduce-only and take-profit/stop-loss — and below that a positions table, an account panel and a status bar.

The buy page works with real prices: it queries a public market data endpoint every fifteen seconds, aborts in-flight requests cleanly, pauses on a hidden tab and falls back to a stored state on failure — and then labels it as such ("reference market state" rather than "live"). Alongside it a swap widget with token selection in an overlay, search, page-scroll locking, escape to close and its own slippage setting.