ART DIRECTION: SILA REBRAND
What is Sila?
Sila is a Banking, Digital Wallet & ACH Payments API for teams building financial products and services. Sila offers a simple, secure, and scalable banking API to make money programmable with built-in regulatory compliance. Sila’s banking APIs replace the need for integrating with legacy financial institutions, saving months of development time, and thousands in legal and regulatory expenses. With the use of SILAUSD, a U.S.-issued stablecoin pegged to the U.S. penny, a user can store value and transfer money from bank accounts to white-label wallets.
As the sole Product Designer at Sila, I have worked closely with the Engineering and Product teams to build internal and external tooling from the ground up, designed to scale. I have also assisted the Marketing and Sales teams with many marketing initiatives.
The Project
As Sila began to evolve and grow, the branding began to feel limiting and outdated. It was time for a fresh start to showcase how Sila has matured since its founding 4 years prior. This project was major, we needed a new logo, color palette, website, iconography, and illustrations. Since I was the only designer, we needed the help of an agency to get this off the ground.
My Role:
We hired Ramotion design agency to help us with the production of all the assets, my role in this project was the Art Director, and I met with the design agency a few times a week, along with our internal team, to make sure the vision of the stakeholders was being brought to life. I guided design decisions from start to end and helped the internal team vocalize their creative ideas to the design agency.
The Team:
- Art Director
- Illustrators/Brand Designer
- Webflow Developer
- Web Designer
- Sila VP of Growth & COO
Branding Goals:
The internal team all had their own personal visions and goals when it came to what the new branding should look like. Here is a summary of what we were trying to accomplish:
A new look and feel that felt more modern but still approachable and friendly
Colors and imagery that gave a nod to the company’s founders and roots in Oregon
Brand elements that could provide more design variety, we didn’t want the same pattern and colors repeating
A color palette that wasn’t limited to just one shade, one we could work with!
Original Branding:
Sila’s original branding was fairly limited in design variety:
The color palette was limited to one primary color, and the brand assets were limited to one gradient and one custom graphic to overlay. This was easy to work with in the beginning, but as Sila scaled and started producing more marketing content, there was a serious lack of variety in the assets.
The original Sila logo lacked balance, which made it difficult to work with when designing assets. The tall “S” often was a pain point when it came to designing nice lockups for marketing materials.
The only font within the design system was Lato, which is a friendly and neutral font, however, it became repetitive over time. We needed to make sure we had more than one font to work with.
Logo Exploration:
Our original logo needed to be more balanced, and while it had a subtle nod to the dollar sign, many people mistook it for a power button. We wanted our new logo to fix both of these issues and wanted to maintain the connection to the dollar sign.
The process of narrowing down a logo involved the stakeholders and me picking out our top 3-4 logo designs and discussing what we liked about each. From there, the designers took our preferences and continued to iterate on the designs. I had a strong preference for more rounded corners and a classic two-story lowercase “a”, which is a complete 180 from the original.
Here is the final logo we landed on! This logo felt connected to our financial roots while being softer and more friendly. This fit in perfectly with our messaging of making it easy for companies to work with us.
Moodboards / Brand Identity Exploration:
Once we settled on a logo, we explored various moodboards to help us settle on a direction for our graphics and general brand identity. Ramotion presented us with a variety of concepts, and we provided feedback on what we liked and didn’t like about each.
We all were drawn to the pastel colors presented in a few of these boards, along with moodboards that utilized a lot of shapes and geometry.
We liked the idea of exploring more geometrical patterns as an ode to the patterns we see in the high desert of Oregon, specifically Pendelton. We wanted a subtle nod to the state the company was founded in.
It was important to the founders that the use of blue remained in the palette. The inorganic pigment “Oregon Blue” was discovered at Oregon State University, and the founders wanted to use a blue similar as a nod to Sila’s origins.
We wanted to steer away from gradients, as we already utilized gradients heavily in our original branding, and seemed to be present in a lot of our competitor's branding.
With this feedback, Ramotion supplied a variety of directions to go in for our graphics and brand package. Many different patterns were explored as we weighed the pros and cons of each and picked out our top favorites.
Out of all of the options, we all were drawn to a triangular pattern of a variety of sizes, colors, and textures. We liked how this could be utilized in a variety of ways and wasn’t limiting. We could explore textures and sizes here. Now that we had a pattern locked down, it was time to tie this all together with a color palette.
Color Palette:
We knew we wanted to continue with a primary blue, so we explored various shades and triad color schemes. We applied a few of these color palettes to the brand assets to help us decide on the best one.
We ultimately decided on the third one, which provided a variety of shades with a lot of versatility, including a nice variety of pastels.
Iconography:
Building a set of bespoke icons was important to us to really elevate our brand. We explored a variety of styles and ended up being drawn to the icons that related back to the striped texture we were using in our triangle pattern.
From there, we explored two different options in a variety of colors with the stripe pattern, one more linear, the other a softer approach.
We loved the readability of the linear approach and ended up using the higher contrast blue and purple color palette to make it easier on the eyes.
Typography:
Our typography needed an upgrade. We wanted fonts that felt friendly, but not too casual that it didn’t feel connected to the fintech industry. A bold, rounded font paired with a taller, thinner font would strike the right balance for us.
After exploring a variety of font combinations, we decided on Poppins for headlines, and Inter for the body text. We liked how Poppins is geometric in style and communicates an open feel. Inter is very readable and provides a nice balance to the heavier weight of Poppins.
Illustrations:
Finally, we focused on the illustration style we wanted to see for the bespoke graphics on our new website! Similar to how we narrowed down a pattern style, we looked at mood boards to discover what we were drawn to. We knew we wanted a nod to a geometric style, to feel cohesive to our pattern and icons, so we focused on the second moodboard of the bunch.
We went through a few rough drafts to get the concepts right, and the team decided on their favorite approaches
This resulted in some gorgeous bespoke drawings for us! I worked with the agency to define what these illustrations would depict, and how to best visualize the concepts of the Sila ecosystem, peer-to-peer transfers, KYB and KYC, and digital wallets. Here are some of the final versions of these gorgeous illustrations, using our brand new color palette.
Here’s a depiction of a peer-to-peer transfer, two people sending and receiving Sila to their digital wallets.
The main hero image for the homepage of our website, which depicts the Sila ecosystem within one app.
The New Website
Now that we had a defined brand identity, it was time to apply it to a completely new website. We used our original website as a template, along with a refined homepage that I had designed on my own as inspiration. With these two references to go off of, we could begin applying the new branding and graphics to the site.
This is a snapshot of the original site, showcasing a portion of the homepage. This was designed prior to me joining the Sila team. This served as the original content and where we took inspiration for site structure.
This is a version I designed as I was playing around, prior to hiring the agency for our big rebrand. Here you can see a snapshot of a potential homepage. We used a lot of the components here for inspiration for the new site.
We went through a variety of design rounds to get the homepage to where we wanted it to be, we played around with different hero illustrations, layouts, and pattern designs. Ultimately what ended up on the homepage relied largely on the opinions of Marketing and Sales.
A few different homepage iterations.
Final Website Designs:
The final homepage design packed a punch with a large bespoke graphic and it continued to feel unique and balanced as you scrolled down the page. A tabular system under “Our Features” allowed visitors to cycle through our various offerings and see bespoke graphics with each tab.
Many of our pages displayed bespoke interfaces and graphics to help explain our product offerings. It was important that we use imagery to help people fully connect the dots of more complicated concepts. This is a snapshot of our Crypto page, which touches on a variety of product features.
Unique UX:
We developed a robust tag system to help visitors discover and connect with all of our partners. This page showcased all of our product capabilities and the powerful partnerships behind the API. Users can utilize this marketplace to connect with our partners and learn more about how they’re used within the Sila ecosystem. We wanted to empower customers and prospects to learn more about our product and how they can best utilize our offerings.
Final Brand Guidelines
Putting it all together in a brand guideline was the final piece to the puzzle! We now had a solidified brand to move forward with for the future of Sila. This brand guideline now sets the scene for all of Sila’s marketing collateral, and user interface initiatives! Below are a few shots from the final guidelines: