Vesper

Vesper Capital came to us mid-rebrand with a wordmark they liked and nothing else. Everything downstream of it had been assembled by whoever had the file open that week, so the factsheets, the pitch deck and the website each argued for a different company. We built the rest of the system around the mark they already owned.

A wordmark and nothing else

Finance brands tend to over-promise stability and under-deliver personality. Vesper needed a system that could hold both: credible enough for institutional clients, distinct enough to be recognised at thumbnail size.

The opening audit turned up eleven typefaces, four different greens and no rule at all about how numbers should be set, which matters when half of what the firm publishes is a table.

Setting the cadence

The system rests on one grotesque with a properly tuned tabular numeral set, sized on a seven-step scale. Choosing a single family over the usual serif and sans pairing was the decision everything else followed from: Vesper publishes performance figures every month, and a table only reads as trustworthy when the digits hold their column in every weight. We widened the zero and flattened the one so a page of returns scans as data rather than prose.

The constraint that kept us honest was the compliance footnote. Every regulated document Vesper issues carries six lines of small print, so any layout that only worked with the footnote cropped out was not a layout. Two ideas did not survive that test. An animated mark that unfolded on load was charming once and tiresome by the third visit, and it died completely in email signatures and printed reports, so motion is now reserved for state changes. An early gold accent tested as generic against every competitor we lined it up beside, and the near-black green carried the same weight with far less noise.

What shipped

Sixty pages of identity guidelines, a forty-two component library for the marketing site, motion principles for the client portal, and editable templates for pitch decks, factsheets and quarterly reports. Rollout took six weeks from kickoff to launch.

The guidelines live on a documentation site rather than in a PDF, which was as much the point as the design was. Type scale and colour tokens export from the same file the website builds from, so the two cannot drift apart. Vesper’s internal team has maintained it since handover.

Six months on

Requests to Vesper’s design team for one-off assets have dropped by around seventy percent, because the templates answer most of them before anyone has to ask. A client pitch deck now takes an afternoon instead of two days. The part we keep returning to is smaller than either number: getting the figures to sit properly is what made the whole system feel considered, and nobody outside the firm will ever notice why.