The Top Navigation

What changed

The left sidebar is gone. Navigation now runs along a bar at the top of the application, built on the Heather colour system the last releases put in place. The destinations you use most sit in the bar, the rest gather under a single More menu, and your organisation and your account controls sit at the right. On a narrow screen the bar folds to the brand and one menu button, and a drawer slides in carrying every destination and every action the bar holds, so nothing is lost when the width runs out.

Why it matters

A sidebar spends a fixed strip of every screen on navigation whether you are using it or not, and on a phone it spends space you do not have. Moving navigation to the top hands that width back to the work, the invoices, the ledger, the import you actually came here for, and it does so without hiding anything: the common destinations stay in view, and the less frequent ones are one click away under More rather than scattered down a list.

The change that matters most is on a small screen. A bar that merely shrank would strand the controls that did not fit, and the actions you reach for least, your settings, the theme, signing out, are exactly the ones a careless collapse drops first. Here the collapse is deliberate. Below the breakpoint the bar becomes the brand and a menu button, and the drawer behind that button carries the full set: every destination, your organisation, settings, the theme switch and signing out. The rule the drawer is built to hold is simple: nothing the bar offers on a wide screen is out of reach on a narrow one.

Proof and impact

The navigation draws only on the colour system, so its contrast meets the WCAG AA standard against its surface in both the light and the dark theme, the same checkable guarantee the colour system carries: sample a control and its background and the ratio holds. The destination you are on is marked by weight and by a filled shape, not by colour alone, so the cue survives a colourblind reader or a glance in poor light, the same principle the rest of the interface follows. Every control in the bar and in the drawer meets the minimum touch-target size, so the drawer is worked by thumb on a phone, not only by a cursor. While the drawer is open it holds keyboard focus, and it returns focus to where you were when it closes, so a keyboard or screen-reader user is never left stranded behind it.

There is no change to the API and no change to your data. This is the interface you see, not the kernel beneath it. There are no breaking changes.

What is next

The top bar is now the frame the rest of the interface hangs from. The width it returns and the structure it sets up are what the next work builds on: a verification status surfaced where you can always see it, and a fuller dashboard beneath it. That is next in line.