Context
Velsera was formed from three companies: Seven Bridges (bioinformatics), Pierian (clinical interpretation) and UgenTec (molecular diagnostics). Each brought a global platform with its own functionality, visual style and technical base. Customers were about to be sold one company and shown three different products.
Business context
- Goal
- Present three acquired products as one company.
- Metric
- Brand consistency across platforms at launch; shared-component adoption per team.
- Trade-off
- A clean-slate redesign versus three live platforms that could not stop shipping. Resolved with a layered system: foundations first, shared components next, legacy migration last.
What made it hard
- Three codebases, three front-end stacks and three component libraries, none of which could be rewritten.
- Three visual identities with loyal users who did not want their tool to feel like something else overnight.
- Very different jobs under one roof: research pipelines, clinical reporting and lab workflows share a brand but not a workflow.
- A merger timeline: the brand had to launch before the platforms could converge, so the system had to work in layers.
What I did
Brand redesign
Led the new Velsera identity for product: colour, type, iconography and motion rules written for dense software first, marketing second.
Audit of three platforms
Inventoried every component, pattern and token across the three products to find what was shared, what clashed and what could be left alone.
A layered design system
Tokens and foundations that every stack could adopt immediately, a shared component set for new work, and migration paths for the legacy libraries.
Rollout with the teams
Worked with the three platform teams on adoption order, so each release moved closer to one product without stopping feature work.
The result
For the business: one brand across the portfolio, and a credible story that the products were becoming one. For the teams: a shared system to build new features on, and a clear migration path for the rest.
Reflection
The audit was the most valuable artefact and the least glamorous. I would do it earlier and share it wider; it settled more arguments than any mockup.