How Money Works

From zero to a million copies sold. Every touchpoint of the How Money Works platform, designed and built from scratch.

00

challenge

Most people graduate school with little understanding of how money works, and financial advisors struggle to explain the basics in a way that actually sticks. The HowMoneyWorks team set out to fix that with an approachable, engaging educational platform built for learners of all ages. The catch was that nothing existed yet: no brand, no product, no book. For the thousands of advisors who would build their practice around it, everything had to be right.

solution

I led creative across every touchpoint of the program. That meant building the visual identity from scratch, designing the website and learning platform, illustrating an original cast of educational characters, art directing the core book, and producing motion content spanning video and Lottie animations. One visual language, deployed consistently across every format.

I designed the brand from the ground up with a clear intention: make finance feel approachable without dumbing it down. The color palette and visual language were built around the idea of building blocks and pathfinding, simple and purposeful. Primary colors were kept deliberately uncomplicated, mirroring the straightforward nature of the subject matter itself.


year

2021

timeframe

9 months

tools

Adobe Suite, Figma, Lottie, After Effects, Final Cut Pro

category

Branding, Creative Direction, Motion Design, Product Design

01

One of the most important creative decisions was developing a cast of original characters to carry the educational content. Rather than leading with charts and jargon, the characters created a sense of peer-to-peer learning, making fundamental to intermediate financial concepts feel relatable and human. But the real system was underneath — each character was built from modular puppet parts in Illustrator, making them fully animatable in After Effects and deployable as Lottie animations across the platform. One character system, every format, total consistency.

02

I laid out and art directed the core HowMoneyWorks book from start to finish — cover design, typography, page structure, and every illustration woven through the content. The goal was a book that felt as engaging to look at as it was to read, something advisors would actually want to hand to a client. It went on to spawn four follow-up titles built on the same visual foundation.

03

The same character system that lived in the book came to life through animation. I produced a full suite of motion content in After Effects — explainer videos, animated vignettes, and UI animations exported as Lottie files for the platform. The pipeline from Illustrator puppet parts to After Effects to Lottie meant every animated asset stayed on-model and on-brand, no matter the format or context.

04

Beyond the book, I designed the digital learning platform homepage and a full suite of interactive vignettes covering a wide range of financial concepts. Keeping that consistency from the book to the screen to an interactive experience was essential to making HowMoneyWorks feel like a complete program rather than a collection of disconnected pieces. Over 5,000 agents signed up after launch and built their practice around it.

1M+copies of How Money Works sold since 2022
5K+agents signed up for the HMW program since launch
4follow-up books built on the same visual foundation
16interactive training modules designed and produced

.let's connect

Always open to conversations where UI, brand, and systems leadership accelerate growth.

.let's connect

Always open to conversations where UI, brand, and systems leadership accelerate growth.