Portfolio · Creative Brand Build

Vaultly

Brand identity and web development for a fintech challenger — one judgement layer across everything a compliance-wary buyer sees.

The client

A fintech brand outgrowing its own visuals.

Vaultly had shipped a working product and a first cohort of paying users, but three different agencies had touched the brand across eighteen months — a logo refresh, a marketing site rebuild, a product redesign — and none of them spoke to each other. The interface, the website and the pitch deck each told a slightly different story about what the company was.

The challenge

Trust is the entire product, visually.

A fintech buyer’s first filter is not features, it is whether the brand reads as a company that will still exist in five years and will not lose their money. Every visual inconsistency — a mismatched type system between the app and the site, a marketing page that looked more "startup" than the product it sold — cost trust before a single feature was evaluated.

The second constraint was regulatory: colour, iconography and claim language all had to clear a compliance review, which most brand studios treat as an afterthought and which here had to be load-bearing from day one.

The approach

One system, reviewed once.

01Audit before designEvery existing surface — app, site, deck, support emails — catalogued against the brand it implied, before a new mark was drawn.
02Compliance in the roomLegal and design sat in the same working sessions, so palette and claim language were resolved together instead of redesigned after rejection.
03System over assetA documented design system delivered alongside the identity, so the product team could extend it without re-briefing an agency.
Delivery

From audit to launch.

01
Brand audit and territory
Cataloguing the drift across app, site and deck; two visual directions argued against the compliance brief.
Weeks 1–3
02
Identity and design system
Mark, type, colour and motion rules, cleared with legal before build.
Weeks 4–7
03
Website and launch kit
Marketing site rebuilt against the new system, plus investor and sales decks.
Weeks 8–11
04
Product interface pass
Key in-app flows re-skinned against the same tokens so app and site finally matched.
Weeks 12–14
What shipped

Everything a buyer sees, one judgement.

01Identity systemLogo suite, type scale, palette and motion rules, compliance-cleared.
02AI-native design systemTokens and components, documented and handed over in code.
03Website and launch kitRebuilt marketing site, investor deck and sales collateral.
04Product UI passIn-app surfaces brought onto the same token set as the site.
Identity system
Mark, type and colour, cleared through compliance review before launch.
Website rebuild
The marketing site, rebuilt to finally match the product it sells.
Product UI pass
In-app surfaces brought onto the same design tokens as everything else.

Legal sits in the working sessions from week one, not at final sign-off — palette and claim language get argued and resolved live rather than redesigned after a rejection.

The design system and component library were handed over in code, so the in-app pass was a token swap rather than a rebuild.

Scoped to requirement

One judgement layer, not three vendors.

The value was never any single discipline. It is the seam.

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