ShopCanary watches for failures that make no noise. The design system has to feel like an instrument that is definitely still switched on — calm, precise, and impossible to mistake for decoration.
The reference is not a dashboard. It's an instrument on a night shift: a seismograph, an ECG, a hangar panel at 3am. Dark ground, one signal colour, hairline rules, monospaced numerals. Nothing decorative competes with the one thing that matters — whether the line is flat.
The trace line is the system's signature. Use it as a section divider, a loading state, an empty state, and the hero motif. It runs flat until something breaks. It is never used as generic ornament — a spike in the artwork should always mean the copy nearby is about a failure.
The canary carries the entire proposition in its face: a checkmark in one eye and a bar chart in the other. Verification and measurement, staring straight at you. Those two glyphs are the brand's secondary iconography — use them wherever the product proves something rather than claims it.
The brow is angled. Never soften it, never tilt the bird into a friendly mascot pose. It is on duty.
The mark is drawn for dark grounds. On light backgrounds it needs the ink outline to survive — never place it on mid-tone grey.
Keep the crest's height as minimum breathing room on every side. The spikes must never touch a container edge.
Gold does the work of an accent colour and a brand colour, so it must stay scarce. If a screen has three gold elements competing, two of them are wrong.
“Not checked yet” is a real state and must never render as green. A canary that has never reported and one that just passed look identical to a hurried merchant — and that confusion is precisely the failure this product exists to prevent. Grey it, name it, and say when it will next run.
Every claim in the product and the marketing must be something the app can show. ShopCanary detects and reports; it never edits a store, and the copy must never imply otherwise.