The complete design history
Every design, redesign, and pivot to the interface — from the first calculator in April to today — told in order and in plain language. No jargon: each entry says what actually changed on screen and why it mattered. Built in the Drop Score design system it documents.
1 · A calculator was born (Apr) and the Instagram look — Obsidian Dispatch — was locked. 2 · The tool became an app (early May): tab bar, saved page, verdict cards. 3 · The real breakthrough (mid-May): the image-forward share card and the Crop Curator tool you built by hand. 4 · A huge "Brand Revamp" shipped (Jun 2–4) — then you opened it, said it "still looks like before," and reversed into the stripped-back "Is it worth it?" screen. 5 · The grader got its own system (Jun 23) that mirrors the tool, ending in the new grade-card.
00Before the brand
Before any of it had a look, the carousels were just assembled from stock templates. Worth noting only because it's the "before" — the baseline everything reacted against.
01Genesis — the first tool & the first brand
April is where two things are born at once: the calculator you actually build, and the Instagram identity. They deliberately look different — the tool wears LEGO's own red/yellow; the carousels get their own darker, editorial identity.
02Going mobile — the tool becomes an app
Early May is a dense, three-day sprint that transforms the site from "a web page you scroll" into "an app you use." Almost everything that makes it feel native lands in this window.
03The share card — the real breakthrough
Mid-May is the piece you built by hand, and it's the most important design in the whole project. Not a tweak — a whole new object: a poster-quality card that turns any set into something worth posting.
After 17 iterations, the card locked to one shape: 4:5 portrait, the set's photo filling the entire frame, with a black gradient fading up from the bottom so text stays readable over any image. The competing "two-block" layout (photo on top, dark panel below) was killed outright — the note in the file literally says "Wow, this was a terrible redesign!!!" The gradient-overlay is the locked direction.
The card: full-bleed set photo, gradient overlay, set name in a soft glow, an italic "unique fact" line, and the grade letter — whose color is sampled from the set's own photo (that per-set accent color also tints the eyebrow and URL; LEGO yellow is just the fallback).
The Crop Curator tool: you built it because product photos don't naturally sit right in a 4:5 crop. It's a guided, one-set-at-a-time studio — zoom, X and Y sliders to reframe the image, an accent-color picker, a grade dropdown pre-filled from the math, and the fact line. You then hand-tuned the crop of every set, starting with the 30 anchor sets across two rounds (round 1 on white, round 2 full-bleed). That curated data now covers 173 sets. Tall sets (Eiffel, Barad-dûr, the Tallneck) even get a swapped-in product-on-white photo so they fit the frame.
04The Brand Revamp — the current live look
June 2–4 is the most ambitious redesign of all: a numbered 16-"Decision" system, shipped over three days. This is what's live on the site today. Its big idea was to make the share-card DNA into every card, and to reorganize the whole app around three pillars: a month spine, status-first filtering, and the verdict as the payoff.
05The reversal — "Is it worth it?"
Then came the honest gut-check. You opened the freshly-shipped Revamp and it didn't feel new. Instead of adding more, the next move was to subtract — hard.
A handoff note captured the reaction to the shipped Revamp in plain words: "it still looks very much like it did before… This is very disheartening." That frustration is what triggered the reversal — the realization that sixteen decisions of more hadn't changed the feeling, so the answer had to be less.
06The grader gets its own system
Mid-June, a second product — the Drop Score grader — needs a look of its own. Rather than invent one, it borrows the tool's language and locks it into a reusable system, so the reports and the app never drift apart.
07Where it stands today
July. Three of the four tracks are in a strong, aligned place. One is still waiting for its reset.
Here's the honest status of the look you want gone: "Obsidian Dispatch" is still the structural backbone of the carousels — even the July drafts cite it. Everything since April has been evolution on top of it (sampled palettes, occasional light grounds, the weekly rotation), not a clean replacement. There is no named successor system yet.
The share card is your proven new language — image-forward, gradient overlay, a grade colored by the photo itself. It already conquered the tool. The obvious next move is to turn that same aesthetic into a new carousel system and retire Obsidian Dispatch for good.
Across every era, one instinct keeps winning: let the photo and the grade do the talking, and cut everything else. The share card found it first; the tool and the grader followed. The Instagram feed is the last piece still waiting for that same reset.