The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Following its 2025 rebrand, Starling approached Brighton-based motion studio Buff to make a run of short films promoting features across its app and website. The app-based UK bank had paused much of its marketing while it built out its product, and by the time the rebrand launched – with a mission to help people be ‘Good with money’ – it had a mature set of tools, from budgeting and payments to saving and managing debt, that many customers had never noticed. Rather than produce the brief as 16 social films, Buff used it as an opportunity to answer the question the rebrand had left wide open: how should the refreshed brand behave in motion? The outcome is a motion framework, a set of principles and behaviours made to outlast the campaign that prompted it.

Starling wanted the films to feel vibrant and scroll-stopping while still feeling right for a financial brand. Lean too far into explanation and they would become product walkthroughs; lean too far into play and they would chip at the confidence and trust a bank depends on. The refreshed identity was well defined, but no motion system yet existed to support it. “Trust is something a bank has to earn rather than claim. You build it by communicating with clarity, confidence and consistency at every touchpoint,” Creative Director Tom Allen explains. “When the way a brand moves consistently reinforces the values that underpin everything else, people stop noticing the animation itself and simply feel that the brand behaves as it should.”

“Starling’s brand isn’t built around wealth. It’s built around confidence,” Allen tells us, and, alongside that, the team saw the bank as a distinctly human one. Those two attributes became the project’s guiding principles, and Buff’s mandate was to define how such an abstract quality should translate into motion. Doing that frame by frame meant treating confidence less as a visual style than as a set of behaviours: how quickly something should appear, how it should enter the frame, how much to reveal at once, where to send the viewer’s attention next. “We weren’t creating a style guide; we were establishing a way of thinking,” Creative Team Lead Myungeun Kim explains. What that thinking produced was, in Allen’s words, “direct, purposeful movement with a playful human confidence” – fast and efficient in its short, smooth easing, with room for a flourish wherever the brand’s human side needed to surface.

Each film runs around 20 to 25 seconds, made primarily in vertical 9:16 with additional 4:5 versions. All 16 share the same four beats: open on a relatable problem, introduce the feature that answers it, connect that to a real customer benefit, then hand over to the brand. Each film starts from a customer problem, which is what kept them clear of feeling like a tutorial. “Once you’ve established that relevance, the product becomes part of the story rather than the subject of it,” Kim notes. “That gave us room to introduce warmth through pacing, humour and visual touches, without ever losing sight of the film’s purpose.” Holding every film to the same structure carried the risk of making the same film again and again. “The storytelling came from the problems themselves,” Kim adds, and Buff treated the four beats “more like a rhythm than a rigid template,” letting some films reach the feature quickly, and others linger. Each answers a different everyday frustration, from feeling disorganised to worrying about money, so every film opens from a different emotional place.

Buff worked with Starling’s existing brand typefaces, giving each a defined job: Displaay’s warm, geometric sans serif Avantt set the core messaging for its legibility, while Contrast Foundry’s more technical CoFo Sans was held back for calls to action and supporting detail. “Typography became the primary storytelling tool because the films didn’t include voiceovers,” Allen explains, so the way each message enters, settles and hands over to the next sets the pace of the film. To keep that on-screen copy short, the studio leaned on emojis, borrowed from the social-first channels the films were designed for. “They felt human and approachable rather than frivolous,” Allen notes, used where they sharpened a message or reinforced a reaction, and only rarely to carry one on their own. The same restraint shaped the layouts: transaction lists set on the diagonal for rhythm and movement, the interface beneath them simplified for readability, and a colour pairing agreed up front for each film.

Buff wrote a guide to onboard motion artists and keep consistency across the project – the creative treatment, technical approach and motion principles gathered in one place. It proved useful enough to be delivered to Starling’s in-house team alongside the finished films, as a working reference for whatever they make next, and in Allen’s summary the language it set out “shaped these films while giving Starling a framework for future work.” Within Starling, that framework has reshaped how the bank approaches product storytelling. “It is held up as the benchmark across the business and has been some of our best performing content,” Executive Creative Director Neil Cooper tells us.