Castit

Save and Delete were the same black rectangle. Headings were barely larger than the text under them, and colour was decorative – an orange link, a green badge, a blue checkbox, with no system behind any of it. Every feature looked like the year it was built. None of it was anyone’s fault: each one was reasonable on its own. Together they were a pile.

The old library – orange links, a blue checkbox, and three black buttons that all look the same.

In 2023 I proposed the redesign/rebuild, and got it – with a fence to fix the interface, but without touching the brand. Same typeface, same palette, same general look. Somewhat harder than a free hand, but it was a right decision – Castit was live and had been part of people’s daily work for years, and a visual reset would have meant relearning a tool they already knew.

The old playlist editor – a top bar of mismatched controls, and accordions doing a tab bar’s job.

So I changed the structure instead. Navigation got grouped into sections instead of one flat list. The vertical tabs went horizontal and gave the page its width back. I made colour mean something – green for online, red for offline and for anything that deletes. Every screen got the same skeleton: breadcrumb, tabs, content, one save button in the same corner. Wherever the content allowed it I made a view switchable between a list and cards, which is most of why the interface started holding up on narrow screens. The flows and the hierarchy of options I left where they were – anyone who knew where something lived before still found it there.

Once the redesign was approved it went out to live section by section, over three years – into a product people were using that day. We kept adding new features in the middle of it, and each one had to fit both the part of the system that was already rebuilt and the part that wasn’t yet.

New screen with media files – breadcrumb, tabs, a list and grid toggle, Save in the same corner, and the library panel on the right to add content from.

New screen and the players paired to it. Green is online, red is offline, the pairing process is explained on the spot.

Those features were the other half of the work. The slide creator was the largest – fills and gradients, borders, shadows, corner radius, size and position – so a client could build a slide without opening Canva. Scheduling. A rebuilt apps section, with the icon set that went with it. Permissions and workflow: roles, members and departments, for organisations big enough to need them. The screens and players flow was also restructured – one screen, connected to one or many players, with content set up before a device is ever connected.

New slide creator – fills, borders, shadows, size, position and layers, so a slide gets built inside Castit.

New library – stock and cloud sources as tabs, and any view that could be a list or a grid is both.

The new features were scoped in discussion: what they cover, what changes in the flows around them, what gets cut. The team ideated things; the CTO was the decision maker. Then I drew it, specified it, and reviewed it with the developers who built it.

New apps screen – one card format for every app, category filters across the top, and green for anything installed. New icons for all apps.

Alongside the product, I was creating slide creator templates, presentations, brochures, business cards, promo material. Keeping the brand consistent and growing was part of the job.

Slide creator templates – a hundred of them, sorted by orientation and by trade, ready to open and change.