Launchpad Designer (Beta)

The Launchpad Designer is available as a beta feature. As the tool continues to develop, you may notice updates and improvements over time.

The Launchpad Designer is a visual design tool for creating and maintaining Neptune user launchpad experiences. It brings layout, appearance, and content structure together in a single workspace with a live preview, so you can shape a user launchpad experience and see the result as you work.

What the Launchpad Designer is for

Traditionally, designing a user launchpad experience involves working in multiple specialized Cockpit tools, with limited visibility of the complete user experience until the launchpad is executed. The Launchpad Designer closes that gap: you design the launchpad visually, and the platform generates the same governed, metadata-driven configuration behind the scenes.

The Launchpad Designer helps you to:

  • Understand how a launchpad will look and behave while you design it.

  • Adjust appearance, theme, and structure in one place.

  • Shorten the cycle between a design change and seeing its effect.

  • Lower the technical barrier so that design ownership is feasible for non-developers.

The emphasis is on reaching a coherent, working user launchpad experience efficiently rather than on configuring individual settings in isolation.

How it fits with the existing launchpad tools

The Launchpad Designer is a complementary, appearance-focused experience. It does not replace the existing launchpad tools, and those tools are not deprecated:

Launchpad Layout

Defines reusable layouts that control launchpad appearance and can be assigned globally.

Tile Layout

Defines reusable styling for individual tiles.

Tile Group Layout

Defines reusable styling for tile groups.

The Launchpad Designer is the recommended starting point for most launchpad design activities and provides the most efficient path to common design goals. The existing layout tools remain fully supported and continue to be valuable where their specialized, reusable layout capabilities are required. Both approaches work together within the broader launchpad management experience, and you can move between them as a scenario requires.

From design time to runtime

Everything you do in the Launchpad Designer is design-time activity. When you save and activate, your visual design is translated into the platform’s standard launchpad configuration, which is what the user launchpad experience uses at runtime. Because the output is the same governed metadata produced by the other tools, a user launchpad experience designed here behaves consistently with the rest of the platform and remains manageable through the existing tooling.

What you can design

At a high level, the Launchpad Designer supports:

  • Appearance and theme: the launchpad’s theme and the colors of the launchpad chrome (theme and surrounding interface elements), with separate light and dark previews.

  • Structure and content: the tile groups and tiles that make up the launchpad.

  • Identity and behavior: launchpad-level settings such as the header, navigation, and logo.

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