Enginery
Artifacts / Design

Lettura: one screen, six states

If the app is one screen, the design work is not the layout, it is the six states that screen has to be in and the one it must never show.

Made

05 Sept 2026

Format

Six artboards, rendered from the design canvas

The pitch says one screen. That makes the design question narrower and harder than a layout: which states does the one screen have, and which state is it forbidden to enter?

Today's chapter in the app: a Lettura wordmark with a queue count of four, the volume and chapter number, the title La casa sull'albero, a filled blue play plate with a scrubber reading 0:55 of 07:42, three paragraphs of Italian set in a serif, and a collapsed glossary of six words.
Oggi. The only screen with buttons on it. Play is a filled plate and everything else is an outline, because on a walk the first tap is always the same one.
An iPhone lock screen showing Friday 5 September at 9:41, with a now-playing card for La casa sull'albero, subtitle Lettura, Capitolo 3, a progress bar at 2:37 with 5:05 remaining, and skip-back, pause and skip-forward controls.
Lock screen. Native grammar throughout. Only the artwork and the copy are the app's, because the phone is in a pocket for the whole of the walk.
A finished chapter reopened: the header reads Fatto, ieri, the title is La chiave di ottone, a note says it has been heard three times, the chapter text follows, and there are no Fatto or Ancora buttons anywhere on the screen.
Riascolto. A finished chapter, reopened. Same view, no buttons, because replaying something must not move the queue.
The empty state: the queue count reads zero and the screen says Chiedi un nuovo volume, with a line explaining that the refill nudge has already gone out.
Coda vuota. Today is null. The copy says to ask for a new volume rather than inventing something to do.
The word capture field near the bottom of the screen, labelled una parola che hai dovuto indovinare, with a submitted word shown as sent.
Parola. A word is typed, not tapped. Typing is a signal too, and the typed words are what the next volume gets written around.
The lock screen at 6:30 on Saturday 6 September with a single notification from Lettura reading La casa sull'albero and nothing else.
06:30. The chapter's name and nothing else. No count, no streak, no encouragement.

Three decisions these are arguing for.

Play is the hero. It is a solid accent plate and the only filled object on the screen. Everything else is an outline or a rule.

The chapter text is the one non-system voice. The chrome runs on a condensed industrial sans; the chapter itself is set in a serif, because it is being read rather than operated, and reading is a different posture from operating.

The queue count publishes, the next chapter does not. “Four in the queue” is useful: it says whether a writing session is due. Showing the next chapter would turn one obligation back into a backlog, which is what the email did.

The Italian here is placeholder, written to the same constraint the real chapters are: every word in it is one I already know, except the six in the glossary.

These were drawn as a live canvas and are published as still images, because the canvas compiles its device frame in the browser and this site’s content policy does not allow that. The pictures are the argument. The running version was only ever the drawing surface.

The rest of the argument

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