Liquide · Lending infrastructure
From a rough concept to a full brand in two weeks, then on to the investor deck and the conference kit that took it to Singapore.
Overview
Liquide is an Australian fintech rebuilding how loans are originated. Instead of borrowers chasing banks, borrowers tender their profile and lenders come to them. The company sees itself as infrastructure, the pipes that information and capital move through, not another bank.
The founder came to me through Toptal with a name, a rough idea for the logo and two weeks. What started as a logo job became the whole visual identity, the investor story and the kit Liquide took to an investor conference in Singapore.
Problem
Most lenders speak the same visual language. Blue or green, a shield, a column, a tick. It says safe, but it also says old, and it says nothing about a company trying to change how lending works.
The brief ruled all of that out. No blue, no green, no bank tropes. The founder wanted something that felt like intelligence and movement, closer to a technology platform than a high street branch.
Investors and brokers still need to believe this company can move real money. The brand had to feel modern and still feel serious.
A website launch and a corporate video were already scheduled. The logo, colours, type and video titles all had to be ready inside two weeks.
Strategy
The founder already had a name for the logo idea: Flow Gate, a point of access that money and information move through. I kept the idea and stripped the form back until it was simple enough to work as a favicon and strong enough to fill a stage screen.
From there, every later piece had to tell the same story. The ring is the gateway. Purple is the platform. Orange is the one thing that moves through it.
Liquide
Identity
Motion
Storytelling
Explorations
Exploration 01
Exploration 02
Exploration 03
System
The brief asked for a logo, a palette and a typeface. I delivered those as a brand guidelines document, so anyone on the team could use them correctly without asking me.
Deep purple
#2E1065
Covers, dividers, dark surfaces
Accent purple
#5F01D1
Wordmark, primary brand colour
Orange
#F97316
One accent per composition
Lavender
#EDE3FB
Soft panels and highlights
Off white
#F4F0EF
Working surface for content
| Level | Size / line height | Typeface |
|---|---|---|
| H1 | 56 / 64 | Merriweather |
| H2 | 40 / 48 | Merriweather |
| H3 | 32 / 40 | Merriweather |
| Body | 16 / 26 | Merriweather Sans |
| Caption | 12 / 16 | Merriweather Sans |
Logo family
Horizontal lockup for covers and closings, mark only in dark, off white and reversed versions for favicons, app icons and busy photography.
Deliverables
Deliverable 01
Small particles move towards the centre and disappear as they arrive, and the mark builds itself out of that movement. It stands for the financial information people bring into the platform. The outro runs the same idea backwards, so the mark breaks apart into particles instead of a plain fade.
Four versions: full logo and mark only, each with an intro and an outro. MP4 for review, ProRes MOV for the video edit.
Deliverable 02
Phase 2 started here. The founder needed a 39 slide investment memorandum built from three sources: an approved manuscript, a visual brief and a detailed report. Before building it I made a slide template library with 13 diagram layouts, so every slide came from the same parts.
Two rules kept it readable. Off white is the working surface, full purple only for covers, chapter dividers and the close. And the copy stays exactly as approved. Every slide was checked against the manuscript, so careful wording like "is designed to" never quietly turned into a promise.
To support it I drew a 40 icon library in Figma and art directed an AI imagery library in seven directions, each one mapped to a chapter of the story.
Deliverable 03
In October the founder took Liquide to the Yield & Growth Investment Conference in Singapore, with a display desk and an eight minute talk. The final copy arrived two days before the print deadline.
The kit:
Print was its own job. I fixed the PDF page size and trim box, checked every QR code scanned to the right page, and sent flattened backups in case the printer's software struggled with the gradients.
Deliverable 04
Alongside the conference, the founder started a 12 article thought leadership series on LinkedIn. I designed four banner directions, then built every article as its own numbered version, 52 frames in total, all from the same master components.
Reflection
The Flow Gate idea was right. My job was to find the simplest shape that still carried it, and to defend that shape with confidence.
The guidelines were part of the two week job, not an extra. Two months later they are why a full conference kit could go to print two days after the copy landed.
A slide can look perfect and still say more than the company can promise. Checking every line against the approved copy was as much my job as the layout.
