One thing at a time isn’t a feature. It’s the product
Everything we could have added and didn’t was left out for this. A screen that shows two things at once has already failed, and the right number of primary actions per screen is one.
Manifesto
The rules we don’t negotiate.
Akai is made for adults with ADHD, and for anyone who feels buried. These are six decisions taken once, written down here so that every new screen inherits them instead of arguing them all over again.
The world is lilac, the action is warm
The background is Akaion violet lifted by twenty-five points of lightness: calm is a property of lightness, not of hue. On top sits a single warm accent, and it has only three uses — Kai’s face, the “done” button, the “now” block.
The serif is a choice, and it cost us an argument
The first exploration proposed a rounded sans, free on Apple devices, against a serif weighing a hundred and twenty-eight kilobytes. The serif won: reading as calm rather than as a productivity tool is half the product, and that half was worth the weight.
No lever built on guilt
No streaks to lose, no badges going dark, no summaries of how far behind you are. Those levers work — on the wrong people, and not for long. Here the moment that matters most is coming back after days away, and it says nothing at all.
Where something came from is checked, not announced
Every line says where it came from, in quiet text with a glyph — not in a colored pill. A filled shape shouts, and this information is there to be checked, not celebrated.
The app and the site are the same thing, seen from two sides
This page uses the same tokens, the same typeface, the same three durations and the same thirty-seven drawn objects as the app you’re about to open. If a color is needed here and doesn’t exist, it gets added there first.