Mergesoft / Connector Clouds

Mergesoft had been developing and maintaining a Windows desktop ERP application for NeoBank since the company's founding. The system was the operational backbone for the bank's employees - managing clients, accounts, loans, projects, HR records, task tracking, messaging and more. It worked. But it had no brand, no cohesive visual language, and no design system guiding it.

New features had been added over the years in an ad hoc way. Controls were styled inconsistently. There was no colour palette, no typographic hierarchy, no identifiable identity of any kind. As the system grew in scope and the Mergesoft team began positioning it as a standalone commercial product - Connector Clouds - the need for a proper design foundation became urgent.

This was not a greenfield product design. The application was a mature, complex system with years of accumulated functionality, and the code defined hard constraints on what could and couldn't change. Element positions, control sizes, tab structures - much of this was locked. The design work had to be done within those constraints, not around them.

The scope was correspondingly broad. Every screen, every module, every control had to be brought into alignment with the new visual system: client management, account and loan views, project management, HR and time tracking, calendar, messaging, configuration panels, and the application launcher itself.

I was the sole designer on the project throughout its four-year run. The work began with establishing the brand - name, logo, colour palette, and a set of UI guidelines for the most frequently used controls. Once that foundation was in place, the application itself became a long, module-by-module design process: taking existing, unstyled views and redesigning them to the new standard, one at a time, in close collaboration with the frontend and backend development team.

Because I worked daily in the application myself (Mergesoft used it internally to manage tasks, time, projects and HR), I experienced the interface as a user first - which informed every design decision I made.

The product name and logo were designed to reflect what the system actually does: it connects - people, data, processes - through a cloud-based architecture. The Connector Clouds mark combines two interlocking cloud forms rendered in a two-tone blue palette: a deep navy for credibility and a bright sky blue for approachability. The rounded, geometric construction of the mark mirrors the system's multi-module structure while remaining immediately legible at small sizes in the application header.

The brand palette - navy, sky blue, warm sand, and white - was applied consistently across the application's UI, from the sidebar navigation to status badges, data highlights and the login launcher.

The login screen for Connector Clouds doubles as a system launcher - users choose which environment they want to connect to (development, main, or production) before authenticating. Each environment is represented by its own animal icon (Lupus, Gecko, Pingvin), making the selection clear and memorable even across multiple system instances.

The split-screen layout - login panel on the left against a contextual lifestyle image on the right - carries the brand's balance of professional utility and approachable design. After selecting a system, a modal handles user credential entry.

The GEKON shell - the main application window - uses a browser-like tab model, allowing users to keep multiple modules open simultaneously. A persistent dark sidebar provides navigation within each module, while a global search, notification area, mail, and toolbar controls run across the top. The visual system uses the brand palette with careful colour-coding for statuses, progress states and data categories throughout.

The four-year design process transformed Connector Clouds from an unbranded, visually inconsistent system into a coherent, commercially presentable ERP product with its own identity and a unified visual language across all its modules.