Home Dashboard

January 2026

Pixel-art home dashboard showing the time and date, weather, train departures, calendar events, smart-home controls, music playback, and news headlines.

The challenge

In my home, I have a smart speaker with a touchscreen that does little more than display the time and temperature. Seeing that as wasted potential, I designed a custom home dashboard interface that transforms the display into something genuinely useful, tailored to a specific user.

A white smart display with a pink fabric base showing the Home Dashboard interface, photographed on a dark tabletop. Home Dashboard train information view listing departures and arrival stations, with a warning about reduced service and a cancelled train.

Arcade Style

I designed the dashboard with an arcade inspired visual language, combining pixel art icons from independent artists, a custom 3x5 pixel font for numbers and symbols, and the Pixel Operator 8 typeface for body text.

Saturated colours, influenced by classic Teletext interfaces, reinforce a retro digital atmosphere. The bento grid layout enables a modular presentation of information, creating clear visual separation between individual content modules while maintaining overall cohesion.

Home Dashboard style guide showing its black-and-white pixel font samples, bright color palette, and matching pixel-art icons.

Information dense

Because this interface has a permanent place in the home, I prioritised information density over immediate ease of use. This results in a slightly steeper learning curve, but allows the user to access significantly more information at a glance once familiar with the system.

I also designed the interface to be highly dynamic, responding to contextual events such as national holidays and weather alerts to keep the experience relevant and alive.

Annotated Home Dashboard layout explaining its live weather and holiday clock, train departures, calendar, smart-home and Wi-Fi controls, transit updates, music player, and news headlines.

The result

I am very happy with how this personal project has developed so far, having explored the unique interactions and functionalities made possible by allowing for a steeper learning curve. I hope to further develop this concept into a fully functional dashboard in the future.

Sources

For the icons, I used these icon packs: