The Allergic Dog is a veterinary dermatology brand founded by a board-certified veterinary dermatologist, and AxiDerm is its app of ten clinical decision-support tools. The founder knew exactly what each tool was for, how vets would use it and what it had to do, and she had prototyped every one of them herself with AI, although none had been designed from a UX point of view and each lived on its own inside a first draft of the app.
The tools went from two drug maps to severity scores, checklists and a reference of 187 differentials, none of them designed for tablet or mobile, and the challenge was making them usable and functional for vets who open them mid-consult with cases outside their specialty, where the right answer has to be quick to find and hard to misread.
Scope
As the sole designer, working with a full-stack developer, I owned the design from the AxiDerm wordmark, brandmark and brand guidelines to print-ready handouts for dog owners, and designed the app from scratch around a dashboard organised by clinical problem, checking every screen against the founder's clinical source.
The design system was built from scratch on the colours and typefaces of The Allergic Dog, with a component library and variables that give the whole suite a shared light and dark mode.
Choices
The hardest part was translating complex clinical decisions and information into a tool that stays clear and easy to use, so that it answers a vet's question without adding friction, which meant carrying everything the founder needed to communicate without overwhelming the person reading it, and keeping the result clinical and reliable while still approachable.
Colour played a decisive part in that balance, because in the two drug maps it had to group drugs by mechanism and by clinical family while keeping red for warnings. On tablet and mobile the bubbles became too small to read or tap, so the maps first used numbers and a legend, and when the client asked to see the names I showed them and kept the legend as the tap target.
Outcome
AxiDerm launched successfully in September 2026 and almost 150 vets are already using it, so a specialist's knowledge is now within reach of any vet during a consultation, while tools that had started as ten separate prototypes work as a single product under one brand and one design system.
The handoff to the full-stack developer included the components in Figma, an interactive prototype and a design.md documenting the system, and its categories and filters let the suite keep growing with new tools without redrawing what already exists.
