The direction
Every sari-sari store in the country hangs one. Ruled rows, the thing on the left, the price on the right in numerals you can read from the street, updates taped over the old lettering, and sold out written straight across the line. It is the Philippines' native interface for what is available and what it costs — which is the whole question this product answers.
This is not the client's website and owes it nothing. It is derived from the market the product actually serves: people booking a court in Davao, paying cash at a counter, on a phone, often for a group.
What it refuses: the two things any court-booking app ships. Bright energetic green-and-blue with rounded cards and stock photographs of people mid-swing; or, avoiding that, quiet editorial hairlines and a muted natural palette. Both are guessable from the category alone.
The board
The hero is not a photograph or a hook — it is the board. Free time is lettered in yellow because the empty slot is the subject: a free court is the product, and a booked one is just a line already crossed out. Prices are the loudest thing on the page by a wide margin, because that is the question that actually decides a booking.
| Court | Free tonight | Per 30 min |
|---|---|---|
| 1Court 1Pickleball · indoor |
5:00
5:30
6:00
6:30
7:00
7:30
|
₱450peak |
| 2Court 2Pickleball · indoor |
5:00
5:30
6:00
6:30
7:00
7:30
|
₱450peak |
| 3Court 3Badminton |
5:00
5:30
6:00
6:30
7:00
7:30
|
₱380peak |
| 4Court 4Tennis · outdoor |
5:00
5:30
6:00
6:30
7:00
7:30
|
₱600closed for repaint |
| 5Court 5Basketball · half |
5:00
5:30
6:00
6:30
7:00
7:30
|
₱520peak |
| 6Court 6Volleyball · outdoor |
5:00
5:30
6:00
6:30
7:00
7:30
|
₱520peak |
Yellow is free, struck through is taken, dashed is somebody mid‑checkout. Court 4's price is struck the way a board strikes a line it cannot sell today — the number stays visible, because a customer who saw ₱600 last week needs to see what happened to it.
The reversal
This is the single most useful idea the concept round produced, and it came from a direction that lost. Your calendar today gives booked slots the visual weight — tinted, bordered, filled — and leaves free ones blank. That is backwards. Nobody opens a booking page to admire what is already taken.
The eye lands on 5:30, 6:00 and 7:30 — the three you cannot have.
The eye lands on 5:00, 6:30 and 7:00 — the three you can book.
Palette
The gold in the previous direction could only ever be a fill — white on it was 2.2:1 — and it could not carry status at all. Every colour here works as both a fill and a text colour, which is what lets the palette stay this small. The only rule: dark text never sits on the saturated fills, white does. Ink on cobalt is 2.39:1 and ink on red is 3.52:1, so neither pairing is used.
A deliberate change from what is in lib/design/sports.ts today. Five saturated sport colours plus brand, money, attention and paid is nine competing hues on one screen. On a board, categories are separated by ruled sections and lettering — so sport is carried by the roundel and the caption, and the hue demotes to a quiet mark that identifies a court at a glance without shouting over the price. These are marks and fills only, never text.
State
Six booking states do not need six hues. A board marks its lines: stamped, outlined, struck through. This is how the form already works, and it means colour is never the only encoding by construction rather than by compliance review — the mark, the border style and the word all carry it. It also survives the printed receipt, which has no colour at all.
Dashed means waiting on something, dotted-and-struck means it is over, solid means somebody decided. A clerk learns that in one shift and never needs the legend again.
The artifact
It gets read aloud at a counter, written on a note, and scanned off a cracked screen, so it is set in the board's own hand at the largest size on the page, tabular, with a torn edge that says keep this half without writing it.
CB-B2-9F4KQ
Multi-venue
The previous direction had a problem I flagged and could not solve: wearing one operator's identity everywhere is right for the first client and wrong for the second. A livery system solves it. The board, the type, the stamps and the roundels are constant; each venue takes a band colour and its own name in the masthead. A clerk who moves between two venues is never confused about which one they are looking at, and no venue's brand has to lose to another's.
Typography
The vernacular comes from scale, rule weight and colour blocking — not from a novelty face, which is also what keeps this out of caricature. Barlow carries every dense surface and has the tabular figures the day sheet needs; Archivo Black does the shouting.
Worth saying plainly: the product's current Space Grotesk and Inter pairing is the exact combination that appears in nearly every AI-generated interface, and it is part of why the app reads generic. Neither is used here.
Where the discipline came from
Six foreign worlds were dealt against this direction. Two hold up as live alternates; four lost, and each gave up one discipline this direction was missing before it was presented.
booking_events already records the trail and no surface exposes it; a stamped board makes the audit view obvious.Honest risks
This is the real one. Neighbourhood-store vernacular is exactly right for the product's market and possibly wrong for Panorama Summit's self-image. A hotel selling a luxury stay with stunning views may not want its booking desk speaking in tarpaulin. That is a business call, not a design one, and it should be made before any build.
Done carelessly, a vendor product wearing working-class vernacular is condescending. The defence is craft: the discipline of a well-made board, executed at full commitment, with no winking. No novelty face, no fake hand-lettering, no distressing.
An admin console full of signage red would be exhausting. The discipline: board grammar governs pricing and availability; everything else inherits the ruled rows and the type without the saturation. Loud where it is useful, quiet everywhere else.
Demoting five sport hues to quiet marks contradicts a decision already in the codebase and in the court-map editor. It is defensible and it is not free — the floor map and the calendar both read sport by colour today.
Still open
| Question | Why it is open |
|---|---|
| Whether this survives the client | Everything above assumes the product's market wins over the first client's self-image. If Panorama has to recognise itself in this, the livery band may not be enough. |
| Photography | Carried over unchanged: surfaces stay typographic and photographs live only in a gallery. This world needs images even less than the last one did — a board has never wanted a photograph. |
| Dark theme | Still deferred, as agreed. One ground here, #FBF7EF. Note a board is a light object; a dark rendition of this world would be inventing something the form does not have. |
| The floor map | If sport becomes a stencil, the court-map editor needs re-thinking — it currently identifies courts almost entirely by sport colour. |