There's levels to this

Airfoil is a design studio that builds brands for web3, crypto, and fintech founders. Interviewing for their Lead Brand Designer role, I was given a take-home: a full brand identity for Loues, a concept blockchain platform that lets people move money and manage assets without a middleman. Logo, color, type, a social mockup, and whatever else made the case. The cap was five hours.

The hard part wasn't drawing a logo, it was trust. Loues is aimed at everyday retail investors, the people who find crypto intimidating and web3 a little unhinged. So the brand had to feel current enough to be credible in web3 and calm enough that someone's mum would open the app. My thinking was to blur the line between web2 and web3, borrow the composure of a good banking app, and drop the neon-and-3D crypto clichés. All of it inside five hours.

One phrase cracked it: there's levels to this. For a retail investor, Loues is a set of steps toward more control over your money, each one a level up from traditional finance. I built the identity around that. The logo and backgrounds use a gradation effect, a solid form that fans out into layered panels, like a deck of cards spread across a table. It reads as progression and gives a flat system a sense of depth. The same element doubles as a window, a mask you look through to see a real person managing their own finances.

The rest followed. The mark is a combination logo with an "L" icon that holds at tiny sizes and passes the black-and-white test. The primary color is a cyan I named Scooter Blue: friendly and approachable, but still reading as trust and transparency, which is the tightrope this category walks. For type I used two free fonts, Noemi for display and Switzer for body, a deliberate call to keep costs near zero for an early startup. Then I ran the system across the places a real brand lives: a Twitter profile, poster ads that double as social posts, merch I'd actually wear, an app icon, even a fictional conference. The copy carried the theme, from "levels above traditional finance" to "your assets, your control, your way." I also put legal disclaimers on the finance posters, because fintech claims carry consequences and that's better built in from day one.