Merla
Project Description
An RFID inventory platform, designed and built from scratch. Stock counting is usually slow, manual, and wrong by the time it is finished. Merla replaces it: thousands of tagged items scanned in seconds with a handheld, and an inventory picture that is close to live.
Staff walk through a location with a Zebra TC27 handheld while the system reads every tagged item nearby, checks it against what should be there, and flags anything missing, misplaced, or unexpected. Behind that sits the rest of it: a cloud backend for inventory sync, tag management, reporting, and Business Central integration, a label generation and printing workflow for Zebra printers, multi-tenant architecture so several companies can run on the platform independently, and the authentication and infrastructure that has to hold when real stock is on the line. The website is built the same way, from scratch. Astro handles the page transitions, GSAP the motion, and custom shaders the hero and the footer, alongside a 3D model and ASCII animations we wrote for it. The gridlines running through the whole site are there because the product is technical, and the site should not pretend otherwise.
- Industry
- Retail & Logistics
- Deliverables
- Brand Identity, Website, Cloud Platform, Mobile App, Posters
- Scope
- Identity, Web, Product, Development
Typography
Helvetica Neue is the least romantic choice available, which is exactly why it is here. Merla is a system that counts things and tells you what is missing. The type should sound like an instrument, not a pitch.
It also has to survive being small. Item counts, tag IDs, and location codes all end up set at sizes where a more characterful face starts falling apart, and this one holds its shape down there while still carrying a poster at full height.
Uppercase (26)
Lowercase (26)
Color Palette
Alabaster
#EAEAEA
Blackmetal
#070707
Umbra
#231D20
Serpent
#6E44FF
Serpent Soft
#9D54FF
Grid
#D2D3D3
Blackmetal and Umbra do most of the work, dark enough to read as industrial hardware rather than as another SaaS dashboard. Serpent is the one place the palette raises its voice: a violet that runs through the shaders, the logo, and the poster gradients, with Serpent Soft to lift it. Alabaster keeps the interface readable, and the grid hairline is its own colour on purpose, because the gridlines are part of the identity and not a leftover from the layout.
