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Fixing the same-size card grids made the site more correct and no less forgettable. The actual complaint was about the whole page, not a pattern - which meant the fix had to be a hero, motion and rhythm pass, not another round of component surgery.
'How it works' and 'Principles' were both an icon-heading-text grid, identically sized, in the exact way any landing page's craft floor flags as the default nobody actually chose. Replaced with two compositions that carry real information in their shape.
The redesign needed eleven new social images, from a 600px email header to 2560px channel art. They're drawn by one Python script from the site's own font, and the first run came out in the wrong weight entirely.
PaceStreak's Content Security Policy allows nothing from other origins, so the new typeface had to ship with the app. Archivo's width axis turned out to be the whole reason to choose it.
The signature interaction of the redesign is a hand-drawn X that draws itself when you tick a day. It's two SVG paths, one CSS keyframe and a pathLength trick, with no JavaScript animation at all.
The old look was near-black with a lime accent: a fitness app that looked like every fitness app. The new one is a printed wall calendar you cross off in marker, because that's what the product actually is.
Why the calendar-and-X logo was replaced by the original lime bolt, and why a mark has to survive being sixteen pixels wide.
The wall calendar palette lasted a day. What we rolled back, what we kept, and why structure and colour are separate decisions.
One test in the suite fails only between midnight and 05:30 in India. It compares the machine's local date with a server that thinks in UTC. It's also a reminder to check a failure against the code before the change.
Notes on habit days exposed a classic API trap: an idempotent PUT that sets a day's amount would also wipe its note. Pydantic's model_fields_set tells 'not sent' apart from 'sent empty'.
Adding an 'Add a note' action to a toast revealed that no toast button in the app had ever worked: the swipe-to-dismiss handler captured the pointer and stole every click.
A daily habit started on a Thursday showed a 0-week streak after ten straight days. The first week had been judged against seven days when only four existed.
Progress photos used to live only on the phone. Now they can be backed up to the account, opt-in, with the bytes checked, never cached, and deleted everywhere when backup is turned off.
PaceStreak is a habit and streak tracker for training and everything else worth doing regularly.