DC Two: Data Centre Portal & Brand System
Built the DC Portal drag-and-drop data centre floor plan as a live interactive dashboard, plus established the brand specification that pushes design-systems thinking back to 2017.
The Growth Arc
I joined DC Two as the sole front-end developer and UI designer at a then-small company, working under the lead architect/developer. He mentored me into full-stack development (back-end, databases, the full toolchain) and together we built the platform from the ground up. Within the first year, I grew into second of two technical leads on the software and codebase, with the architect leading, as the team grew to 5 developers.
This is how a designer came to own production code: not through a bootcamp or a career change, but through building an entire platform from scratch alongside a senior engineer who invested in the transition.
The DC Portal
The DC Portal was a comprehensive CMS and client portal for cloud hosting management, SPLA software auditing and automated end-of-month billing across hundreds of clients and resellers. The centrepiece was a drag-and-drop data centre floor plan serving as a live interactive dashboard: a spatial interface for managing physical infrastructure. It included account management, container detail views, product pricing, responsive layouts, and the SAM (Site Administration and Management) tool for daily and monthly operational summaries.
I also built the pod data centre dashboard in React: a complex interactive dashboard with drag-and-drop floor plan view, responsive widgets, colour indicators and animated states for sensors, fans and device statuses. A physical space rendered as a live interactive digital interface, the earliest and clearest precursor to the digital twin work at Insight.
ASX Listing (November 2020)
The ASX listing was directed by the company’s directors in partnership with the stockbrokers. I was a key supporting role in the marketing and communications workstream, coordinating five external specialist providers: a stockbroking firm (formal investor communications), a contract design agency (prospectus, which I co-authored), a contract videographer (investor video series, which I directed), a contract social media marketer (who I managed and who taught me much of what I know about social media marketing and advertising), and an SEO agency (I managed and implemented).
Supporting five specialist disciplines through a public company listing is a vendor-coordination and marketing-breadth story, evidence of the versatility that comes from being the most senior creative person at a growing company.
Early Design Systems Evidence
The DC Two brand specification is significant not for its complexity, but for what it demonstrates: a defined type scale (RobotoCondensed, six weights), four colour tokens with paired CMYK and hex values, four logo variants with explicit usage rules plus one-colour and embroidery variants, and a documented watermark treatment. I delivered the complete brand refresh: logo, stationery, business cards, email signatures, and a subsidiary logo suite (DC Group, DC Tel, MyDaaS, Michell).
Tokens, variants, usage rules, constraints. This pushes the design-systems thread back to 2017, well before the Storybook implementations at Capgemini and Insight.
Beyond Software
The role extended well beyond code: I designed, drafted and project managed building signage and internal wayfinding for DC Two’s office and data centre (delivered and installed), managed social media across LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, supported ISO 27001 quality system accreditation/implementation, and served as close advisor to the Director and senior management on brand, product and strategic communications.
The Concurrency
From December 2016 to April 2022, this role ran simultaneously with signage, exhibition and museum fabrication at The Factory. For four years (Dec 2016 – Nov 2020, 1–2 days per week at DC Two) I ran cloud and data-centre software development alongside physical space design. This is not a career that moved from physical to digital. Both ran at once. In November 2020, DC Two listed on the ASX, offered me a full-time role, and the Factory work ended.
Hard Skills
PHP, React, JavaScript, CSS, HTML5, PostgreSQL, Bootstrap, MVC software architecture and design, UML, JIRA, Figma, SketchUp, brand design, signage drafting, SEO implementation, social media management
Soft Skills
Full-stack mentorship and growth, requirements gathering and business analysis, vendor coordination (5 specialist providers), operations coordination across trades, close advisory to director/senior management and operations manager, brand leadership, ISO 27001 exposure, team scaling (2 → 5 developers)