How we designed the Iris

There’s a small circle on the left of every Take, and we spent an embarrassing amount of time on it. I want to explain why, because it says a lot about how the whole app is built.

Craft · 3 min read

We call it the Iris. It’s the mark that sits on every row in your Dailies, and its job is quietly enormous. In one glance it should tell you what a Take is, whether it’s a note, a task, a reminder, whether it’s the important one, without you reading a word. Get that right and the timeline reads at a glance. Get it wrong and every row needs deciphering, which is exactly the sort of small friction that makes people stop opening an app.

A camera, not a dashboard

The name isn’t purely decorative. “Catchlight” is the little glint of light in the eye, the thing that brings the soul to a stare, making the image come alive. The Iris is our version of that, the point of light on every thought. When it came to drawing it, a camera aperture felt right in a way a generic icon never did.

It’s a 6-blade shutter. The blades sit around a hollow centre, the aperture, which leaves an opening, and each blade belongs to one kind of thing a Take can be. As you shape a Take, the matching blade fills in. A plain note lights one. Add a task and a reminder and more of the aperture comes to life. The mark literally opens up as the Take gains meaning, which is a nicer idea than a row of little badges, and it does the same job in less space.

The one that gets the gold

When you lift a Take to be your Obie, the one thing that matters most right now, the Iris gets a fine gold ring around it. Just the one. We tried louder treatments and they all felt like shouting. A single warm ring says “this is the one” without turning the timeline into a fairground, and it matches the ember gold that runs through the rest of the app.

Why bother this much with a circle

Because this is where the whole design philosophy shows up, in the smallest thing on the screen. I never wanted Catchlight to make you work. Function is nothing without form, for us, and a mark you can read in a fraction of a second is form doing real work, not decoration. The Iris isn’t there to look clever. It’s there so you never have to stop and think about which row is which. When the small stuff is this considered, the app disappears, and you’re just left with your thoughts. That’s the entire aim.