Finance Brand Identity & Website

The Brief

A financial services firm looking to grow, specifically to bring in clients who were younger, more focused on growth, and more conscious of values than their existing base, without losing the trust they had built with established clients. The firm had a genuine commitment to sustainability and wanted that to read clearly in the design, not as a badge tacked on at the end, but as something embedded in the visual language from the start.

The brief also called for animation and modern typography. The client had seen examples they responded to and wanted the site to feel alive and current, not static. The design brief extended to the brand. There were no existing visual guidelines to work from. The identity and the digital experience had to be built together.

Research

I ran a competitor audit across local financial services firms and a wider set of internationally established brands in the sector. The pattern was predictable: conservative palettes, serif typefaces, imagery of professionals in meetings, and testimonial blocks from satisfied clients. The sameness was striking, and informative.

It told me two things. First, the visual bar in the local market was low enough that a more considered approach would stand out without looking out of place. Second, the sector’s generic visual language was doing a specific job: signalling stability, longevity, and trustworthiness through familiarity. Any direction that moved too far from those signals would trigger doubt before a prospect had read a word.

I also looked specifically at how sustainability was handled in financial services branding internationally. Most firms that led with sustainability used predictable shorthand: greens, leaf iconography, earnest stock photography. The effect was often the opposite of differentiation. The research shaped a clear constraint: sustainability had to come through in tone and structure, not decoration.

Design Process

Brand positioning was defined before any visual work began. The brief I set: people-first, sustainability-minded, modern but not trend-chasing. That framing became a filter for every subsequent decision.

The typography direction was an early commitment. The client had been clear they wanted modern fonts, not the sector’s default serif vocabulary. A contemporary sans-serif pairing was chosen to carry both the confidence the firm needed at display sizes and the warmth the people-centred brief required in body copy. The system had to feel current without feeling transient.

Animation was introduced as a structural tool, not a decorative one. Entrance transitions were designed to guide attention through each section in sequence, giving the reader a sense of pace and intention rather than dropping everything on screen at once. The motion language was kept consistent across the page so it read as a system, not a collection of effects.

The people-centred direction shaped the layout and imagery approach from the first wireframe. Rather than leading with products and services, the site leads with relationships. The hierarchy was designed to surface the client experience before it surfaced the firm’s credentials.

Key Decisions

The decision to use a full sans-serif system rather than the serif pairing common in finance was a deliberate departure. The client wanted modern type, and a serif at display sizes would have worked against that brief no matter how it was paired. The sans-serif system required the layout and colour to carry the authority that the typography was not providing through convention. That made every other decision harder, and better.

Sustainability was surfaced through content strategy as much as visual design. The colour palette, copy hierarchy, and section sequencing were all oriented toward making the firm’s values legible to someone scanning the page quickly. The goal was for a reader to understand the firm’s position before they had consciously decided to pay attention.

The animations were specified at a deliberate pace: fast enough to feel modern, slow enough to feel considered. Financial services audiences are not a demographic that responds well to movement that reads as trying too hard. Every entrance transition was calibrated to feel like the content arriving rather than the page performing.

What I’d Do Differently

This site is live, which means it is working. But I am aware of the gaps.

I never spoke directly to anyone in the demographic the firm was trying to reach. Every assumption about what a younger, sustainability-minded financial services client responded to came from the client’s description of their own clients, filtered through the agency. Real conversations with people who fit that profile would have sharpened decisions I made on instinct, particularly around how the sustainability positioning landed and whether the animation pace felt right to that audience.

The site also has no mobile design. I designed for desktop and the development team adapted for smaller screens. For a firm trying to reach a younger audience, that is a significant gap. First impressions from that demographic happen on a phone more often than on a desktop, and motion design in particular needs to be considered for mobile from the start, not retrofitted later.