Novelty and contrast

The tick primer#

He runs a primer with a row of tick marks. Equal ticks have equal conceptual weight. To call for attention we traditionally apply colour, a brand colour or an error state; form works too, and rotating one tick says “this one is different, and more important for a reason.”

Make every tick different and you are back where you started, nothing standing out, the only harmony equal width and height. Dialled back to hand-drawn ticks, a new contrasting aesthetic, the row feels uniform yet slightly playful. Just the right amount of contrast invites curiosity. Figure 2 reproduces the primer; notice where your eye goes.

Intersections of eras and styles#

PP Foundry’s page for the bitmap typeface NeueBit pairs it with Leonardo da Vinci’s Annunciation, painted hundreds of years before computers. You expect an ornamented serif beside a Renaissance painting, so the bitmap face leaves Rauno “unsettled, yet pleasantly surprised,” and a Leonardo communicates mastery of craft. Not for productivity software, but right for first impressions and tone.

amo animates its wordmark through several typefaces while keeping word, casing, sizing, positioning, and colour constant: kinship, and the diversity of a group of friends. Raw Materials, whose mantra is that when everything is the same, different is the greatest of opportunities, serves one of four logo animations per visit: ASCII 3D saying one of their materials is code, soft rounded shapes, a brutalist wireframe of typography.

Off screen, people contrast Nordic minimalism with analog furniture, and Loïc Nottet’s Mélodrame is an orchestral ballad until 1:55, when drum machine beats arrive.

Steve Ruiz’s Engineering imperfection with draw shapes is the hand-drawn tick in production. tldraw gives geometric shapes intentional imperfections because subtle variation adds character and sits better beside freehand sketches. The variety had to keep each shape recognisable, make no two alike, and stay stable, so each shape’s ID seeds the random generator instead of Math.random on every render, which would jitter.

A budget for novelty#

Two years later, in Novelty (February 2026), Rauno puts a budget on this. His hypothesis since 2023 is that the more often an action is performed, the less rewarding any novel treatment becomes (see frequency and novelty), which he likens to semantic satiation, a repeated word losing its meaning. Novelty is an exclamation mark, or seasoning.

He borrows the cinematographer’s three colour rule, roughly 60 percent primary, 30 secondary, 10 accent, treats the 10 as the novelty colour, and proposes the software analogue: 90 percent familiar, 10 percent novel. “Novelty is the contrast to sameness. And novelty works best as a contrast.” Onboarding is a good place to spend it because it happens once: the Devouring Details login-to-welcome transition plays only right after logging in, via a cookie and a rewrite to an animated route.

if (  request.nextUrl.pathname === "/introduction" &&  request.cookies.get(COOKIE_ANIMATE_INTRO)?.value === "true") {  const response = NextResponse.rewrite(    new URL("/introduction-animate", request.nextUrl),  );  response.cookies.set(COOKIE_ANIMATE_INTRO, "false");  return response;}

His other examples are a route transition he would not want on every page but which works on a microsite about interviews against static siblings, and Stripe Press, which hits hard because the rest of Stripe’s pages are not like it.

Intent, tax, and rhythm#

Then he adds intent: how much novelty will the person accept? A game player is receptive. The Browser Company built Arc into a saxophone and struggled to make it a piano anyone could play; their reason was a novelty tax, the average person with a job could not handle how much was new.

Successful novel products are novel in the aspects their smaller, more passionate audience cares about; Not Boring builds photos, habits, timers, and calculators for people who value beauty and game-feel. “Make most things familiar, do something unexpected.”

The budget applies within a page. In the Visual Rhythm section of What will you ship?, on the October 2023 Vercel homepage, an accent colour would stop feeling significant if every element used it, and the same goes for animation. Visual rhythm meant high-novelty sections (a graph tooltip animating a long distance, icons pixelating on hover) never appear consecutively, only paired with low-novelty ones (floating cursors, icons scaling on hover).

The tick primer is a test for any screen: count the things asking for attention, and if the answer is everything, the answer is nothing. Spend novelty where it is seen once and keep the paths walked hundreds of times familiar. When you do something unexpected, make it one thing with a reason you could say out loud.