Silverhorn Investment Advisors

From redesign to long-term relationship

We first got to know Silverhorn in late 2018, working to give their online presence a long-overdue makeover. Since then, we’ve continued to work closely with the team on internal and external projects of all sizes.

Getting to know their diverse team of locals and transplants from around the world, we quickly realised that this is no everyday fintech start-up. They’ve got serious investment abilities and real client trust built up over their past decade of operations, all of which needed to be reflected in a new online presence: in-depth enough to show investors they know their stuff, while light enough to keep clients engaged and educated.

Styling the Silverhorn

To help the company stand out in a sea of fintech companies and much larger investment corporations, we decided early to go all-in on a dark theme with pops of bright blue in the graphics and iconography.

Though Silverhorn’s existing brand assets were rather sparse, we knew from the start that a unique series of aerial photos of the Swiss alps, taken by early 20th century balloonist Edouard Spelterini, would continue to feature prominently.

Applying the new style to Spelterini’s stunning photography of the Silberhorn peak, overlaid with a Silverhorn Blue line cutting through the fog of the investment landscape, results in a unique centrepiece for the main pages of the site.

Simplifying complex concepts

Presenting complex financial topics and processes to discerning investors and clients is no easy task.

Many a napkin sketch and whiteboard scribble were exchanged with the Silverhorn team as we worked our way through process-oriented graphics and conceptual animations.

Best face forward

Behind every investment algorithm is a team of hard-workers, and we wanted to give every one of them their spot to shine. Over the course of a few days, we met with and shot portraits for all of Silverhorn’s team members.

Staff come and go, though, and as much as we love Silverhorn, we couldn’t be lugging our photography equipment over every time they got a new hire. To help the team take quality photos of new staff, we developed a set of guidelines covering composition, lighting, camera settings, and post-production.

Check out their company page and see for yourself if you can tell which ones we took and which ones they did!

Bringing design into the real world

With the digital style well-established, our next logical step was to update the rest of Silverhorn’s printed collateral, including client reports and business cards.

Existing documentation spanned a wide range of content types, from text-heavy analyses to primarily table- and graph-based reports. For environmental and legibility reasons, we opted against using a dark theme for printed collateral. Instead, we adapted our design system for these documents, keeping the Silverhorn blue as a constant, while adding more shades and a range of secondary colours to use in varied data visualisation situations.

Cross-content consistency

When an investment opportunity into ethical lending companies matured enough to merit its own child site, our design system was again called back into service.

With some adaptation to the colour scheme and the creation of a few more conceptual animations to visualise Silverhorn’s involvement in this new lending scheme, the site was soon ready to launch.

On-going partnership

Our ongoing partnership with Silverhorn has led to many interesting projects, including e-mail marketing campaigns, an one-off logo production for an internal project, and even helping their internal marketing team master Figma to create their own graphics and charts!

Let’s hear that concept

Grayscale constantly works together with you to find the best solutions, balancing you and your customers’ needs, your brand values, and other variables.

Not only can we translate your existing offline identity onto the web, but we can also help you create a brand identity from scratch.