System
Creative direction and development of Morgan Stanley’s new brand and design system: digital-first, scalable, and built to evolve.
The challenge was to create a world-class system for one of the world’s leading investment banks—one that could modernise its visual and digital expression without losing the trust, consistency, and legacy that define the brand.
Through close attention to every element and a strong narrative behind each design decision, we built a coherent, flexible system ready to create trust and emotional connection with clients, teams, and partners around the world.
Morgan Stanley design & brand system
Brand colour system
The
Challenge
Morgan Stanley did not have a truly unified design system. Different needs were addressed project by project, with new colours, components, and tools introduced independently. This created fragmentation and made a consistent experience difficult to maintain.
With a global digital presence—from online platforms to physical displays—it was necessary to build a digital-first system that could work across multiple contexts, products, and regions.
Accessibility was also a priority: the new system needed to embed accessibility standards from the outset, including ADA requirements, to create a framework that was accessible, flexible, and ready to evolve.
Typography system
Modernising a brand with decades of history and global recognition required much more than a visual solution. It called for consensus across business units and stakeholders, each with different priorities, perspectives, and needs.
The process combined strategy, design, and stakeholder management, developing narratives and solutions that could adapt to different audiences without losing a shared vision.
Rather than impose a new direction, the aim was to build trust around change and create the conditions for a complex organisation to adopt and make the new system its own.
We developed a digital-first system deeply connected to Morgan Stanley’s legacy, yet designed to evolve beyond current technologies and needs.
Every element was conceived as part of a coherent language that could work across formats, products, and contexts. Existing brand work became the starting point for grounding design decisions and building narratives that explained not only what we were proposing, but why.
The relationship with stakeholders was fundamental to the process. Building empathy and trust created space for innovation and allowed the work to progress toward more ambitious solutions.
The project was therefore as much an exercise in design and strategy as it was in relationship-building and organisational alignment, working closely with Brand Marketing, financial leadership, and different business units.
Proportional spacing system
“Since its founding in 1935, Morgan Stanley has sought to do first-class business in a first-class way. Our challenge was to create a design system held to that same standard.”
Brand iconography