Project

Brand & Product Motion Design

Client

Orenda Finance

Branded Motion ToolkitsMotion Design SystemOnline MarketingSaaS ProductUX Motion
orenda finance

Orenda Finance

Industry

Fintech

As Founding Designer and Head of Design at Orenda Finance, I was responsible for shaping the company’s design foundation from day one – spanning brand, product, marketing, and motion.

Working in a fast-moving startup environment meant building systems while simultaneously shipping product. Alongside leading the visual identity, website, and UX/UI for the core banking app, crypto app, and internal back-office platform, I established a motion design approach that connected the entire ecosystem.

Motion played a key role in making complex financial concepts clearer, more engaging, and easier to understand. From lightweight Lottie animations used across the website and product interfaces, to marketing videos, LinkedIn campaigns, product explainers, and interactive prototypes, motion became a shared language across brand, product, and storytelling.

The Goal

Rather than treating animation as a collection of one-off assets, the goal was to create a cohesive motion system – one that could scale across marketing, product UI, and investor communications while maintaining a consistent tone, rhythm, and visual logic.

The result was a motion-driven design approach that helped Orenda communicate complex ideas clearly, bring the brand to life, and move quickly as the company evolved.

(Lottie Animation)

The Challenge:
Designing in a Startup Environment

As a startup, Orenda was building multiple products simultaneously – a banking app, a crypto platform, a back-office system, and a new brand entering a competitive fintech market.

As Founding Designer and Head of Design, I was responsible for creating the entire design foundation while shipping features, marketing, and product experiences in parallel. Motion became a key tool for bringing coherence to this rapidly evolving ecosystem, helping the brand feel polished and intentional even as the product was being built in real time.

Establishing the Motion Language

To avoid motion becoming a collection of disconnected animations, I established a simple motion language that could work across brand, marketing, and product UI. This included defining principles around timing, easing, transitions, and interaction feedback, ensuring that animations felt calm, confident, and purposeful.

The goal was to create motion that felt native to the product experience while also reinforcing Orenda’s brand personality.

Motion in the Product Experience

Within the banking and crypto apps, motion was used to improve clarity and guide interaction. Subtle transitions helped users understand navigation and hierarchy, while animated states and feedback provided reassurance during key actions such as payments, account setup, or transaction confirmations.

In complex financial interfaces, motion helped communicate cause and effect, making the product feel faster, more intuitive, and easier to trust.

Lottie as a Scalable Motion Layer

To make motion practical for a startup environment, I relied heavily on Lottie animations. These lightweight, developer-friendly assets allowed animations to be reused across the website, mobile apps, and marketing materials without performance overhead. This approach made it possible to embed motion consistently throughout the ecosystem while keeping implementation simple for engineering teams.

Customisable App (Lottie)

No API Integration (Lottie)

Compliance as a Service (Lottie)

Financial Plug-n-Play (Lottie)

Payments Products (Lottie)

Open Banking (Lottie)

Motion for Marketing & Storytelling

Beyond the product itself, motion played a major role in communicating Orenda’s value proposition. I created animated explainers, product walkthroughs, and visual narratives used across the website, LinkedIn campaigns, pitch decks, and sales materials. These assets helped translate complex financial infrastructure into clear, engaging stories that were easier for customers, partners, and investors to understand.

Rapid Prototyping & Investor Communication

Motion was also a powerful tool for prototyping and storytelling during product development. Animated concepts and interactive prototypes were used to demonstrate future features, explore ideas quickly, and communicate product vision to stakeholders and investors.

This helped bring abstract platform concepts to life and made discussions about the product far more tangible.

What This System Enabled

By treating motion as a shared design layer rather than a series of isolated animations, Orenda was able to present a more cohesive and polished experience across brand, product, and marketing.

Motion helped simplify complex ideas, reinforce the brand personality, and make the platform feel more intuitive and modern – while still allowing the team to move quickly in a fast-paced startup environment.

Lottie Microinteractions

To bring motion directly into the product experience, I created a library of lightweight Lottie animations used across the website and apps. These microinteractions added moments of clarity and personality – from onboarding states to feature highlights and empty states – while remaining performant and easy for engineers to implement.

Using Lottie allowed motion to scale quickly across platforms, turning small interactions into consistent brand moments.

Product Explainer Videos

To communicate Orenda’s platform and value proposition, I produced a series of motion-led product explainers and walkthrough videos.

These helped simplify complex fintech concepts such as embedded banking, digital accounts, and crypto services into clear, engaging narratives. Used across the website, demos, and sales conversations, the videos became an important tool for quickly helping audiences understand how the platform works.

Motion for LinkedIn Marketing

Motion also played a key role in Orenda’s marketing and brand visibility. I created short-form motion graphics and animated posts designed specifically for LinkedIn, helping the company communicate product features, partnerships, and industry insights in a way that stood out in fast-moving social feeds.

These animations extended the motion language beyond the product and helped establish a consistent visual presence across Orenda’s marketing channels.

Motion Principles

Motion at Orenda is guided by a small set of principles that define how the platform moves, responds, and communicates.

These principles ensure motion is purposeful rather than decorative – helping explain complex financial concepts, guide interaction, and express the brand with clarity and confidence across product and marketing experiences.

Clarity

Motion should make complex ideas easier to understand.

Animations are used to visualise concepts such as accounts, payments, and financial flows, turning abstract infrastructure into something tangible. By simplifying how information appears, moves, and changes, motion reduces cognitive load and helps users quickly understand what is happening within the platform.

Flow

Motion should guide users naturally through the experience.

Transitions communicate relationships between screens, actions, and system states, helping users understand navigation and hierarchy. By creating a smooth and predictable rhythm across interactions, motion reinforces the feeling that the platform is responsive and intuitive to use.

Trust

Motion should feel calm, precise, and dependable.

Financial platforms require a strong sense of reliability, so animations are designed to feel deliberate rather than playful or distracting. Timing, pacing, and restraint create interactions that feel stable and controlled – reinforcing the confidence users place in the platform.

Scalable Illustration & Icon System

Alongside motion, I designed a modular illustration and icon system in Figma that could scale across product, onboarding, and back-office experiences. Built from a consistent set of components, the system allowed teams to combine and recombine elements to create new visuals quickly – maintaining a cohesive style without needing to design from scratch each time.

These assets were used as static and animations within the product, particularly across onboarding flows where clarity and approachability are key. To extend their impact, I also recreated a core set in After Effects, bringing them to life through subtle, purposeful animation and exporting them as lightweight Lottie files.

This approach ensured the same visual language could flex between static and motion, giving Orenda a consistent, scalable system that worked seamlessly across product UI experiences.

Designing Motion in a Startup

Designing motion at Orenda meant building systems while the company itself was still taking shape. With multiple products, audiences, and priorities evolving at once, the challenge was not just creating animations, but establishing a motion language that could flex across brand, product, and marketing.

By focusing on simple principles, reusable assets, and scalable formats like Lottie, motion became a practical layer of the design system rather than an afterthought. This approach allowed the team to move quickly while maintaining a coherent visual experience across the entire platform.

In a startup environment where speed is essential, motion helped bridge the gap between clarity and storytelling – turning complex fintech ideas into experiences that felt intuitive, polished, and human.