Pulse — a bilingual analytics platform built for independent media.

Most analytics tools were built for English and then retrofitted for other scripts. Pulse was born the opposite way — a product built in Tehran, for newsrooms that publish in Persian first and English second, sometimes inside the same article. The interface had to be genuinely bidirectional from the first pixel.

Bidirectional from the start

We designed the entire layout on a logical-property model: every margin, padding, and position is set in inline-start and inline-end rather than left and right. Flipping the whole interface between RTL and LTR is a single attribute toggle. Charts mirror their axis. Numbers — which stay LTR in Persian — keep their tabular alignment.

"A dashboard is read, not looked at. If a number takes longer to find in Persian than in English, the product has failed."

The system

We shipped a 96-component design system in Figma, a full token set in JSON, and a working prototype in React. The colour system is deliberately muted — newsroom dashboards are watched for hours, so we held the chroma down and reserved bright colour for alerts alone.

• 96 documented components, with full RTL counterparts for every asymmetric one.
• Two typefaces — one Persian, one Latin — sized to optical equivalence, not pixel equivalence.
• A chart library skinned to read at a glance: one colour per metric, no rainbow legends.
• WCAG AA contrast across both language modes, audited by hand.

Pulse launched in late 2023 and is now used by eleven independent Persian-language newsrooms across Iran, Afghanistan, and the diaspora.