The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design
Raycash takes its name from two ideas that meet in one place: cash, the substance of money, banking and daily life, and rays, warm and fast and frictionless, like sunlight. The brand sits at the intersection of the two: self-custodial money that moves like light. The product itself is a consumer banking app for holding, sending and spending money that stays in the customer’s own custody. Its balances are held in stablecoins – digital money pegged to everyday currencies – kept private by encryption, the cryptography that scrambles financial data. Raycash spent a year building that encryption inside cryptographic security firm Zama before spinning out as a consumer product, with Prague-based design studio Ashfall brought in to turn the technology into a brand.
The strategy resisted positioning Raycash as “crypto, but for everyone.” Ashfall let the technology take a backseat and placed the brand firmly in consumer banking, making self-custodial money feel like a natural part of early mainstream adopters’ lives. “The first impression had to feel like banking, and the reason to believe comes from the technology behind it,” explains Founder & Design Director Martin Ehrlich. Co-founder & Chief Product Officer Tom Allison wanted it to feel normal. “Self-custody should feel like a better version of personal banking: clear, safe, useful, easy to understand,” he details. What emerged is a fintech brand where lightness, warmth and movement communicate accessibility without ever feeling too technical or futuristic.
The concept appears first in the logo, introducing two behaviours at once. In the wordmark, light does the work in motion. “We wanted the wordmark itself to express that,” Ehrlich explains, “light moving through the letters themselves, then breaking through them almost like a prism.” The card shape is the moving part. Built from a single focal point, it passes through the logo and tilts in three dimensions as it moves.
The card became the element used across everything else, chosen over a more literal money or light motif because both would be too literal. “It is obviously connected to money, and it is simple enough to become a shape, a pattern, a movement,” Ehrlich adds; once it starts moving through the logo and repeating across the system, “it becomes a behaviour.” That behaviour is the brand’s clearest signature. Enlarged out of the logo, the card shape repeats and tilts across the system as the pattern, a warm yellow standing for the ray of light and a soft green for money.
Raycash’s headlines are set in Displaay’s Gellix, a near-geometric sans with an open, welcoming construction. “The brand had to feel like consumer finance, but different from a conventional bank,” Ehrlich continues, “open and easy to trust, while still having enough confidence” for a product handling people’s money. Raycash’s copy speaks in “short statements addressed to individuals: your money, your movement, your control,” and Gellix keeps those lines from turning “generic or too aggressive.” Its heavier weights make “the short, direct headlines that Raycash prefers feel confident and assertive rather than soft.” Saans, also from Displaay, handles product and explanatory copy. Its monospaced cut adds a precise, technical edge.
The identity was designed for the app more than any other touchpoint. Almost every interaction a customer has with Raycash happens there – making payments, checking a balance and customer service – so Ashfall built the brand around it from the start. “Raycash is the app,” Ehrlich tells us; working from the company’s existing wireframes, the studio defined how colour, typography, pattern and graphs behave inside real product interactions, so “the app became a test for the brand system, rather than an application exercise at the end.” The result is an identity native to the product, not retrofitted onto it later. The brand appears most strongly at particular moments: when money arrives, the screen fills with the pattern and shows the amount in large type, and the same happens on opening the app or making a payment.
Underlying the compositions is a strict 4×4 panel grid, designed to feel flexible without becoming too loose. Panels sit on top of it holding type, pattern, photography or product. The rules are deliberately tight: each panel spans at least four cells, touches at least two outer edges and keeps its own internal margins. The same rules generate layouts across social, decks and web, whether vertical or horizontal, two panels or three, dense or stripped back. “Constraints usually help more than they restrict,” Ehrlich details; “they remove arbitrary decisions,” letting the team keep making new assets with ease.
The system celebrates individual sovereignty, the contested idea that a person’s money is genuinely their own, not held on their behalf until a bank or government decides otherwise. It shows in the details, headlines kept short and addressed to individuals, a humanistic colour scheme, and photography of people enjoying personal freedom. The concept returns in the palette, yellow for light, warmth and movement, green for money and value, with warm beiges and browns keeping the system welcoming.
The AI-generated imagery turns the abstract idea of sovereignty into something human – modern and mobile people in warm light, travelling, paying and living without friction. Ashfall wrote guidelines as precise directions for settings, light, subjects, product presence, tone and stylistic guardrails, so Raycash’s marketing team can generate on-brand assets on its own after handover. “This might be an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think creating brand guidelines for AI is that different from guidelines for humans,” Ehrlich notes. What changes is how you communicate that direction: “the direction has to be more explicit,” he explains, with settings, light, composition and what to avoid all defined more precisely, but “underneath that, it is still image direction.”
Built to grow with the company, the same system works across app screens and product flows, demos, posters, out-of-home and launch materials, holding up at public scale through simple claims, strong colour and a recognisable pattern – framing Raycash as the natural next step in the evolution of personal banking.