FT—EXP—02 / Design brief

GUL

Pray your five

Store line — Gul: Prayer Times & Tracker

Gul means flower. Five prayers, five petals — one opens each time you pray, and a day fully prayed is a flower in full bloom. The sun at the centre is coloured by where the sun actually is in your sky.

Open the app ↗ Read the brief ↓

Reference: FT—EXP—02
Discipline: Product + brand system
Format: Web app (PWA) · native build planned
Status: Live, with accounts and sync

01 / The mark

The name is already the drawing.

Gul is Persian and Urdu for flower. Five prayers, five petals, one sun at the centre. Nothing had to be invented.

One petal per prayer. Pray it, note it, and that petal fills cream.
Not yet is the same petal, outlined. The shape never changes — only its state.
Positions are fixed. Fajr at the top, then clockwise.
Five prayed is a flower in bloom. That is the whole metaphor.
The petal is a dome in profile. Flat base, swelling haunches, a point on top.

All five prayed · two prayed · night — a grey disc, never a crescent

Construction

Canvas: 64 × 64, three circles
Base sits on: r = 5.6
Haunches widest on: r = 14
Apex on: r = 27.6
Profile: base half-width 5.2 · haunch 8 · height 22
Copies: five, at 72° — Fajr top, then clockwise
Clear space: the sun's diameter on all four sides, from the apexes
Small sizes: below 24px the haunch widens to 8.6–9.6 so the five stay countable at 16px

02 / Design + identity

The sun is the palette.

A flower and a sun, deliberately not a crescent — the crescent-and-star is the most-used mark in this category, and reaching for it buys recognition while spending distinctiveness.

−40° to +70° · the twilight stops sit near −22°, where Fajr and Isha fall

Computed, not chosen. Eleven stops, interpolated by the sun's real altitude.
Dusk is not dawn. The setting sun runs warmer than the rising sun at the same angle.
Night is grey (#9AA6AE). Same circle, different colour — the mark never changes shape.
Nothing else in the product is warm.

Ink · #05080A Cream · #F2EDE3 Noted · #7CD9A6 Earth · #4A3A31 Night · #9AA6AE

Gold is the sun and nothing else. Green means a prayer was noted. A lapse is earth. No red anywhere.

Two typefaces, no third. Instrument Serif for prayer names and times. DM Sans for the interface.

Plain, quiet, second person. A window is open or it is not, and the app says which. Nothing is dressed up.

If it can be tapped, it is the whole row. Never smaller than a full-width row at 56px. Five chips on one line was the first version of Today, and it was a thumb aiming at seven characters.

03 / The world clock

One sun. Whichever city you are standing in.

Times are computed on the device, not fetched — so the app works on a plane and in a basement. Press a city and watch the same day rebuild itself.

—

600msThe sun — LINEAR. Radius, colour, glow. Never eases, never waits.

11 stopsThe sky's colour is read off the sun's real altitude, from the dead of night to the meridian.

< 1 minNOAA/Meeus on the device. Accurate to well under a minute, 1900–2100, anywhere on Earth.

Ten conventions. MWL, ISNA, Egypt, Umm al-Qura, Karachi, Tehran, Jafari, Diyanet, Dubai, Singapore — with Standard and Ḥanafī Asr.
High latitudes are handled honestly. Above roughly 48° the sun may never reach the Fajr or Isha angle in midsummer. The app fills the gap by a stated rule and says on screen that it estimated.

04 / The brief

An easy way to keep track of your five.

The job

Accurate prayer times wherever you are, and a quiet private place to note your five.

The answer

A day is one flower. Pray, note it, and that petal opens. One glance tells you where you are in the day.

What you get

Today as five tappable rows, a full timetable with closing times, and a month where each day is its own small flower.

Privacy

Everything works with no account and no network. Sign in and it syncs — readable only by you. Coordinates never leave the device.

Accuracy

NOAA/Meeus solar position computed on the device. No API key, works offline, accurate to under a minute anywhere on Earth.

The line it holds

The app knows where the sun is. It cannot know whether you prayed — that part is yours to enter, and questions of practice go to a scholar, not to software.

05 / Product path

From a working web app to a build that can wake you at Fajr.

Now — the web app

Times, marking, history, accounts and cross-device sync. Installs to a home screen and runs offline.

Next — the native build

Scheduled reminders. A web page cannot reliably wake anyone before dawn. Same mark, same engine, same account.

Then — the store release

Account recovery, consent and privacy documentation, store distribution.

Status. The web app is live and in use. The native build and the store release are a next phase, not a claim already made.