Mountain Duck: Giving their software website a stand-out personality

Business software doesn’t have to look dull. Here’s how I helped Iterate give their Mountain Duck product a website people will remember.

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The challenge

Mountain Duck is desktop software from Switzerland. It’s used for mounting cloud storage and remote servers as local drives. It’s a serious product used by serious designers, developers, and IT professionals, and it has one enormous advantage over its competition. It’s called Mountain Duck.

The team at Iterate understood there was an opportunity to build a website that has far more personality than a typical software site. They had developed their old website in-house using a framework and standard templates. It explained the product well enough, but it looked like countless other software websites and didn’t take advantage of that memorable name and brand.

My challenge was to create a distinctive and enjoyable website, without losing sight of its primary purpose: helping visitors understand Mountain Duck and encouraging them to buy it.

My approach

One of the biggest mistakes software companies make is assuming that professionalism and personality don’t belong together. I believe the opposite is true. A memorable product deserves an unforgettable website, but personality should never come at the expense of clarity. Every illustration, animation, and interaction needs to support a user’s journey and not distract from it.

I began by mapping the Mountain Duck content and simplifying the path between the home and download pages. Once I understood that path, I explored ways to bring the Mountain Duck character into the experience through illustration, typography, and CSS animation. The end-result feels unmistakably Mountain Duck.

The solution

I designed a new visual language, replacing generic framework components with custom typography, animations, and illustrations. The Mountain Duck character appears throughout the site, guiding visitors while adding warmth and humour. Animations are subtle and purposeful, emphasising content while making the experience of reading it feel more enjoyable.

Nothing visitors see was inherited from a framework. Every layout, illustration, animation, and interaction was designed specifically for Mountain Duck. I created the wireframes, illustrations, animations, typography, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript before building the website using Eleventy. When it was complete, I deployed the website to Netlify and handed ownership to the Iterate team through GitHub.

Behind the design

Although the finished Mountain Duck website feels playful, every creative decision was grounded in usability. The project began with wireframes and content planning before moving onto illustration and animation. The machines were sketched out before being developed into scalable vector artwork. Once the visual language was complete, I developed the Mountain Duck website using Eleventy using reusable templates and modern CSS before deploying it on Netlify.

The result

This Mountain Duck website looks every bit as professional as the software it promotes. But, instead of looking like another site marketing software, Mountain Duck’s website now has a personality that people will remember.

What this project demonstrates

Too many software websites rely on the same generic typefaces, templates layouts, and visual clichés. They explain what a product does but leave visitors with little to remember once they’ve closed the tab. I believe software websites deserve a personality too. That doesn’t mean adding whimsy for its own sake. It means creating a visual identity that reflects the product, supports the user journey, and helps people remember what makes it different.