Redesigning PaceStreak as a wall calendar

PaceStreak started as a training tracker and grew into something broader: reading, water, a language, sleep, a habit you’re breaking. The look never followed. Near-black surfaces, a single lime accent, soft glowing cards. It read as gym app, and it read as every gym app.

So the whole thing was redesigned, app, site and blog together, with one rule: nothing visual had to survive. Only the product’s truth did.

What the product actually is

Strip the features away and PaceStreak is one gesture: you did the thing today, so you mark it. Keep marking and a chain forms. The oldest version of that is a paper calendar on a wall and a red marker. “Don’t break the chain” is a calendar trick before it’s an app idea.

That became the world:

• Paper, not a panel. A bright coated-paper ground (#fbfbf8, deliberately not cream), black print, and 1px ruled lines instead of floating cards.
• Calendar red for today, for the main action and for the chain. One red, used where a printed calendar uses it.
• A felt-tip set for habits: learning in blue, health in green, mind in violet. Colour is a second cue only; done or not is always the mark itself.
• Square corners and no drop shadows. Paper doesn’t hover.
• Condensed numerals from Archivo, the way dates are printed on a planner.
• Dark mode is the same calendar under a desk lamp, not a different product.

The one moment

Every design needs one thing people remember. Here it’s the mark: tap a day and a marker X draws itself across it in two strokes, in the habit’s colour. A part-done day gets a single stroke, a slip on a habit you’re breaking gets a ring. There’s no second checkmark style anywhere in the app, not in checklists and not in quests, so “done” looks one way.

What Today became

The home screen used to be a stack of cards. Now it opens on a tear-off page for today’s date next to the whole-life chain in red, and underneath it this week as a calendar board: one row per habit, seven boxes, today’s column ringed. You can see the whole week and fix yesterday without opening anything.

What it cost

A redesign that only changes the palette is a reskin, and the first pass was exactly that: an independent review said it “reads as the old dashboard with new colours”. The rebuild went further: stat cards became ruled rows, pills became index tabs, the Log button became a marker cap, and the site’s features became one printed planner week.