Caravan: a global markets and macro dashboard

Caravan is a global markets and macro dashboard. A brief we set ourselves: hold a full trading day across five connected sections that read like one article, not like an off-the-shelf widget pile. We picked a fixed date, 19 May 2026, so we could test the design against numbers that line up across sections instead of random fillers. Below, the design and engineering choices that hold it together.

Five sections, one continuous story

A typical finance dashboard puts five sections in front of you and each one stands on its own. We did the opposite. The whole of Caravan sits inside a single day, 19 May 2026: Fed at 4.13% after a cut, ECB at 2.25, Brent at 66 on China demand fears, gold at 3,210 on record. When you move from the Overview to the Macro page you don't switch worlds. You're reading the same moment from a different angle.

We got there by writing the day's story before drawing any chart. One page of plain English: where the macro cycle is, what the central banks are doing, where the dollar is, which active conflicts are pulling on capital. Then every number, every headline, every scenario on the dashboard had to fit that page. When a data point did not square with the rest, we corrected it or rewrote the section that cited it.

The result is editorial coherence. Not five panels. One issue of a magazine.

Numbers we wrote, not numbers we rolled

In most product demos, sample data means random fillers that say nothing about the design. We wrote the numbers in Caravan the way a journalist writes an article: every figure for 19 May 2026 holds with the next one. The VIX sits at 22.8 because the day is risk-off. Brent sits at 66 because China demand is soft. Gold sits at 3,210 because the dollar ran weak. The one-year sparkline next to Bitcoin closes exactly on the +18.59% YTD the KPI shows above it.

What you get out of this, as a reader, is that the design holds up against numbers that behave like real ones. You reload the page and the dashboard does not contradict itself. You compare a tile to the chart below it and the math lines up. You read Markets today and Outlook tomorrow and the same story carries through.

When we wire real data into a dashboard for a client, that's the standard we hold the work to.

One colour system, two themes that both look right

Charts are the place a finance dashboard falls apart fastest. One chart that's slightly off-tone, and the serious feel is gone. We skipped the shortcut of an off-the-shelf chart library with a preset palette. We designed seven chart types from scratch (lines, areas, bars, sparklines, donuts, heatmaps, gauges) and connected all of them to a single colour system from our design system.

The choice shows up the moment a user flips between dark and light mode. Greens stay confident on black, reds stay legible on white, the dividers between sections stay quiet. Both themes were designed at the same time, on the same surface. There's no patched-on dark mode that looks like an afterthought.

For a client this is the signal: when we say two themes, we mean both will read intentional.

Terminal density, broadsheet typography

A Bloomberg terminal gives you eighty pieces of information on a single screen. A modern dashboard gives you twenty, with plenty of white space. We chose Bloomberg. Caravan is built for the desktop, full screen width, and the first glance carries six leading indicators, a 24-hour activity chart and the global markets summary table. A reader reaches a verdict on the day without scrolling.

On typography we stepped out of our studio default. Instead of our usual fonts we put IBM Plex Sans on the prose and IBM Plex Mono on the numbers. Plex Mono is a fixed-width face: three columns of prices line up one under the other, the way they do in an 80s financial broadsheet. It's a small choice that does most of the work of making Caravan feel trustworthy at a glance.

On mobile the layout collapses to one column. We did not fight that; the dashboard is a desktop product, and the phone version is the same content in a vertical scroll.