Cisco DICE

How It Started

This project is where two collaborations came together. Ivanot on one side, and Grupo DICE, a Cisco partner, on the other. Two different people, two different working relationships, both converging on the same project. They needed a landing page for Grupo DICE’s Cisco SMB product line targeting Latin America. The goal was straightforward: present Cisco’s networking, security, and collaboration solutions, capture qualified leads through a contact form, and give the team a way to manage all that data on the backend.

What I didn’t know at the time was that both of those collaborations would last well beyond this one project. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Design

We went back and forth on the visual direction. There were discussions about what the site needed to communicate and how it should feel, and what came out of that was a tinted glass look. Semi-transparent color overlays sitting on top of background imagery, with each product category getting its own color identity. Blues for collaboration, greens for security, warm tones for routing and networking. The whole thing had this layered depth to it where content floated over these colored panels, and it gave the page a clean, modern feel without being heavy.

Looking back at it now, I can see design elements that kept showing up in my work years later. The way color was organized by meaning, the semi-transparent layers creating visual hierarchy, the idea that each section should feel distinct but part of the same system. I didn’t see it at the time, but some of what came out of those conversations definitely shaped how I kept thinking about design going forward.

The Form and the Backend

The contact form was the core of the whole thing. This wasn’t a simple name and email situation. Cisco wanted qualified leads, so the form captured company size, industry, what product they were interested in, the person’s role, whether they had decision-making authority. Around 14 fields total. The challenge was making that not feel like a tax return.

On the backend, every submission went through a pipeline: validation, database storage, and an automatic email notification with a branded template. I built the email generation system to dynamically assemble the HTML, so the emails matched the site’s look without relying on third-party services.

Then there was the admin panel. The team needed to see all their leads in one place, so I built a dashboard where they could log in, view every submission in a table, and export the whole thing to a spreadsheet file. Simple, functional, exactly what they needed.

The Carousel

The landing page featured a benefits carousel organized by product category. Three groups of three cards each, color-coded to match their section. Users could navigate between groups manually with a scroll-triggered animation system that staggered elements as they came into view. Left to right, with slight delays between each card. Small touch, but it made the page feel alive instead of static.

What It Meant

This was 2018. Pretty early in my career. And the fact that it was for Cisco, even through an agency, meant something to me. We were touching a company with that kind of reach, and the work we delivered felt solid. The site was clean, the backend worked, the design held together.

But the real value of this project wasn’t the site itself. It was the relationships. Both the collaboration with Ivanot and the agency that connected us with Grupo DICE lasted well beyond this project, and I think that says more about the work than anything else I could write here. When people keep coming back, that’s the best review you can get.

It’s a simple project. Small scope, short timeline, about a month from start to finish. But for me, it’s one of those starting moments. One of the first times I looked at something I shipped and thought, yeah, this is what I want to keep doing.