TradeKrow
Services
UI/UX DESIGN
VISUAL DESIGN
BRAND IDENTITY
Year
2026
Info
TradeKrow is a fintech platform designed to build trust between buyers and sellers through secure, phased payments. I developed its visual identity and logo, translating the ideas of transaction flow, trust, and financial progress into a clean, modern brand mark built for digital-first applications.
timeline
3 weeks
I start every identity project with a brainstorming conversation with the client. As we talk, I note down the words, ideas, associations, and expectations they use to describe the brand. Rather than trying to define the solution immediately, I let the conversation build a pool of ideas that I can later revisit and analyse.
I then identify the recurring themes and key words that can translate into a visual language for the identity. For TradeKrow, this helped me understand the ideas around trust, transactions, security, connection, reliability, and financial flow that the logo needed to communicate.
For me, this stage is crucial because it turns a broad client vision into a clear design direction. It also gets the client and me on the same page from the very beginning, giving me a stronger foundation for the design process while reducing ambiguity, unnecessary iterations, and back-and-forth later on.
Based on the keywords and themes from the brainstorming stage, I move into rapid sketch exploration. I give myself around 30 minutes to freely sketch as many directions as possible, without judging whether an idea is “good” or “bad.”
For me, sketching is a way to think out loud visually to quickly explore symbols, forms, typography, and compositions before committing to a refined direction. This stage allows me to push beyond the obvious and discover unexpected possibilities.
Most importantly, the final logo is often narrowed down from these early explorations, making this one of the most important stages in my design process.
Once I have a strong set of rough explorations, I present them to the client as a visual starting point rather than finished designs. This allows us to look at the ideas objectively and discuss which concepts feel most relevant to the brand and its purpose.
We then go through the sketches together, identifying the strongest visual idea, symbolism, and overall form. This is a collaborative stage where the client’s feedback helps me understand what resonates with them while my role is to guide the direction from a design and brand perspective.
Through this process, we narrow down multiple rough ideas into one clear logo direction. I then take that selected concept forward and explore variations in composition, proportions, positioning, and lockups to find the strongest possible expression before moving into refinement and colour.
After exploring multiple directions and refining the strongest concepts, this stage brings the identity to its final form. The selected logo was developed to achieve the right balance of simplicity, recognition, and versatility.
The final mark was refined through adjustments to proportion, geometry, spacing, and overall visual balance, ensuring it feels intentional and works confidently across different scales and applications.
With the core logo established, the next step was to build the wider visual identity around it defining colour, typography, and supporting brand elements.
