2023
Cryptic Trader
A crypto trading app concept — onboarding, markets, and a full spot-trading screen with candlesticks and order books — built to see how much dense financial data a phone screen can hold before it stops being readable.
Cryptic Trader is a self-initiated design experiment: a complete mobile crypto exchange concept designed in Figma, from the first onboarding screen to a spot-trading view with a live chart and bid/ask ladders. No client, no brief — just the hardest layout problem in consumer fintech, attempted for its own sake.
Notes from the experiment
What I wanted to try
Trading interfaces are the densest screens in consumer software — candlestick charts, timeframe switchers, order books, bid/ask ladders, all fighting for a few inches of phone. I wanted to find out how much of that could stay genuinely readable in a dark UI where two colors do all the semantic work: mint for up and buy, red for down and sell, and nothing else allowed to shout.
What I built
The full core loop of an exchange, designed screen by screen. Onboarding opens with an astronaut catching the moon — the one soft, spacious moment before the density begins. The markets watchlist holds every row to four facts with a sparkline carrying the trend. And the spot-trading screen takes the whole test at once: BTC/BUSD candlesticks with timeframe controls, buy and sell split across the accent pair, and order books running live bid/ask columns in the same two colors. Convert, Spot, Margin, and Fiat structure the app above it all.
It ends where it was always meant to: a finished concept in Figma. The experiment was the density problem, and the design is the answer.
