CIS
Computer
Information
Systems, Inc.
A ground-up brand, design system and product redesign for a public-safety software suite — unifying Computer-Aided Dispatch, eCitations and Records Management into one coherent system officers can trust under pressure.
↓ Read the case studyA single system for the people who answer the call.
Computer Information Systems (CIS) builds software for law enforcement and public-safety agencies — a connected suite spanning Computer-Aided Dispatch, Records Management, Mobile, Jail Management and Civil Process.
I led design across three of those products end to end: the eCitations review workflow, the Records Management System rewrite, and the visual identity that ties them together. The brief was not a fresh start but a rescue — modernise dense, decades-shaped tools without breaking the muscle memory of the officers, supervisors and investigators who rely on them every shift.
Three products, three design languages, one high-stakes job.
The existing tools worked, but each had grown its own patterns, typography and colour. For a user moving between dispatch, citations and records in a single shift, that friction is not cosmetic — it costs seconds when seconds matter.
How do we modernise a legacy interface without erasing the workflows officers already trust?
How do we make dense, high-stakes data entry fast and accurate under real time pressure?
How do we unify three separate products into one system that feels like a single product?
Design that gets out of the way — so the person using it can keep their attention on the street, not the screen.
The state of public-safety software.
Records and dispatch systems in this space are built for completeness first — every statute, every NIBRS field, every prior incident has to be captured correctly. That rigour is non-negotiable, but it tends to arrive as walls of fields and legacy screens. The redesign had to respect the depth while making the surface calm and learnable.
One language across every screen.
Before touching layouts I set the foundations: a single palette, a disciplined type scale and a shared component library. Every product now draws from the same tokens, so a button, a status pill or a data table behaves identically whether you're in citations or records.
Inter carries the interface — clean, neutral, legible at the small sizes these dense screens demand. Roboto Mono is reserved for identifiers, timestamps and tabular data, where a fixed width keeps citation numbers and case IDs scannable.
A mark built to sit on a badge and a browser tab.
The identity direction pairs a solid, dependable wordmark with a compact glyph that reads clearly at favicon size and in a single colour. The CIS blue anchors it — confident and calm rather than the alarm-red the category defaults to.
Reviewing citations, without the pile-up.
eCitations is where supervisors triage officer-submitted citations — approving, returning or exporting them at volume. The redesign centres on a review queue that surfaces status at a glance, a detail view that keeps a citation's full story in one place, and an admin console where agencies configure their own citation types and validation rules.
Records that connect the whole investigation.
The Records Management System is the backbone — incidents, people, cases and evidence, all linked. The rewrite gave officers a calm daily home screen, investigators fast ways to find and compare people, and a case view that keeps a live investigation legible from first report to close.
Every screen answers to who is actually looking at it.
Officer
Starts a shift on the dashboard — reports in progress, calls for service, fast lookups.
Supervisor
Lives in the citation review queue — approving, returning and exporting at volume.
Investigator
Works cases and people — comparing profiles, building the record, tracking evidence.
Administrator
Configures citation types, workflows, forms and user roles for the whole agency.
From three inherited tools to one system with a single voice.
One system
A shared palette, type scale and component library now span citations and records — so patterns learned in one product carry into the next.
Legacy, respected
The redesign kept the domain depth agencies depend on while calming the surface: clearer hierarchy, forgiving data entry, obvious status.
Built to extend
Admin-configurable citation types and role-aware navigation mean the system can grow with each agency without a redesign every time.