Launchpad Designer
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:
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Understand how a launchpad will look and behave while you design it.
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Adjust appearance, theme, and structure in one place.
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Shorten the cycle between a design change and seeing its effect.
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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
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Defines reusable layouts that control launchpad appearance and can be assigned globally.
- Tile Layout
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Defines reusable styling for individual tiles.
- Tile Group Layout
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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:
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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. You can also set the font family, apply custom CSS, and refine tile imagery with filters such as brightness, grayscale, and blur.
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Structure and content: the tile groups and tiles that make up the launchpad. Tile groups come in several kinds. A screen tile group is a top-level area of the launchpad, a section tile group divides a screen into sections, and a menu tile group appears in the launchpad’s menu rather than on the canvas. A screen or a section can also arrange child tile groups into navbar and sidebar columns.
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Identity and behavior: launchpad-level settings such as the header, navigation, and logo, together with authentication, language, and progressive web app (PWA) configuration, and the login page.
How appearance resolves
Appearance in the Launchpad Designer is maintained at three levels: the launchpad, a tile group, and an individual tile. Light and dark are maintained separately, so a launchpad can read well in both.
The most specific level wins, and nothing needs to be switched on for it to. A value set on a tile takes precedence over the same value on the tile group that holds it, which takes precedence over the launchpad. Where a level sets nothing, it inherits the value from above. An override is a value you set on top of what a level would otherwise inherit, and you can reset it so the value falls back to what it inherits.
Each tile group is its own scope. It inherits from the launchpad and from the group that contains it, and not from neighboring groups. Appearance set on a screen tile group therefore styles the tiles placed directly in it, and does not reach the section, navbar, or sidebar groups inside it. Those inherit from the launchpad instead.
A small number of values set directly on a tile or tile group, such as its width and height, take precedence over any assigned tile layout. Each object can also be set to prioritize its own assigned layouts over those it would otherwise inherit from higher up.
The two sources of appearance resolve in opposite directions:
| Where appearance comes from | Resolution direction | Default winner |
|---|---|---|
Maintained in the Launchpad Designer |
Most specific first |
A tile over its tile group over the launchpad |
Assigned through the cockpit layout tools |
Top down |
A launchpad-level assignment over a screen, section, or tile |
| This section describes the model rather than individual settings. The fields available at each level, and the option that lets an object prioritize its own assigned layouts, are described in the field-level help beside each field in the Designer. |