Translucent was building intercompany accounting software — a category with no established UX playbook. Finance teams were managing complex multi-entity, multi-currency transactions across disparate systems, reconciling them by hand in spreadsheets. I joined as founding designer and over 15 months built the brand, the product, and the design system that underpinned it all. The scope was total.
There were no reference products to look at. Intercompany accounting is a specialist corner of finance that most software hasn't touched with real depth. I ran 1:1 sessions directly with the finance professionals who would use the product — accountants who understood the complexities of multi-entity accounting in a way that I didn't. What did their actual workflow look like, where were the failure points? I began with first principles and designed from there.
What emerged was a picture of significant cognitive load. Users were toggling between four or more accounting systems — Xero, QuickBooks, Pennylane, MYOB — tracking currencies and exchange rates manually, and generating journal entries through brittle spreadsheet formulas. The design challenge wasn't just UI cleanliness. It was about making a genuinely novel data model legible at a glance, without flattening the complexity that made it useful.
With a tight delivery schedule and an engineering team ready to build, brand and product work ran simultaneously. The brand had to feel credible to finance professionals — structured, considered, not flashy — while signalling that this was a new kind of tool in a category that had historically been grim to use.
With a tight delivery schedule and an engineering team ready to build, brand and product work ran simultaneously. The product itself required designing for high-density structured data — entities, accounts, currencies, exchange rates, debit/credit columns — without losing legibility.
Speed was non-negotiable. That meant the design system had to be built right from the start, not retrofitted later. I was a strong advocate for tokens and worked closely with the engineering team to establish a shared token language — colour, spacing, typography, and component states defined once and referenced everywhere. This way, the system scaled as the product grew rather than fragmenting under it.
The data grid had to handle text, numbers, actions, badges, inline editing, and error states across editable and read-only contexts. Getting the foundations right early meant the other apps could be built with increasing speed.
Fifteen months. Brand, research, product, and system — built from nothing, shipped and in use. The work was demanding and novel: no tech, no product, no design templates to follow, no incumbents to learn from. Just a domain crying out for better user experience, and a team willing to build it right.