The Coterie
Redesigning an exclusive investment product’s visual language with a focus on interactive prototyping to elevate their user experience.
The landscape of finance and investment products tended towards safe visual languages. The Coterie was courting a narrower, more exclusive demographic, and desired a language that felt exclusive and premium. We approached this with a comprehensive redesign, from visual language to information architecture.
Objective
Redesign the product’s visual language and interactions to signal exclusivity, sophistication, and care, while exploring interaction models beyond static design.
Highlights
Directed visual language exploration and information architecture.
Pushed design beyond Figma into Origami Studio for interactive prototyping.
Created high-fidelity screens, component library, and advanced prototypes.
Led concept testing with users to refine tone, motion, and haptic details.
My Role
As the Design Lead & Manager I was the point person for managing both internal teams and external stakeholders.
Internally I managed a team of 1 Product Designers and 1 Principal Designer. My responsibilities included direction, overall strategy, and tactical direct involvement for prototyping.
I worked occasionally with a Design Director for high level support along with a Product Delivery Manager for operational support.
Externally I worked weekly with their founder, other executive level stakeholders, plus their design team.
Approach
Defining a Premium Visual Language
The Coterie arrived with an aesthetic that felt too reminiscent of older financial institutions. They aspired towards a niche audience who were used to premium experiences.
Throughout the project we evolved a direction that was rooted in more physical materials and richer interactions.
Action: Experimented with real-world visual effects — glass, foil, bokeh, UV printing.
Impact: Established a darker, minimal, elegant direction that became the foundation of The Coterie’s brand identity. Motion driven foil stamp effects in particular emerged as a core brand element.
Prototyping Beyond Figma
Figma alone limited expression of interactivity and sensor-driven effects. Stakeholders were looking for higher impact hero moments to help their product and brand stand out in the landscape.
Action: Shifted into Origami Studio to prototype richer experiences with gyroscope data, haptics, and real-time motion.
Impact: Developed a foil effect that changed color with device tilt, extending to buttons, borders, and typography. This became a signature design element.
Making Membership a Moment
Joining The Coterie was meant to feel substantial, like joining an exclusive club.
This was an opportunity to build upon recent device motion experiment and to expand the physical material usage with different materials.
Action: Designed a digital membership card in Origami, layering masks, lighting effects, and subtle gyroscope motion.
Impact: Created a moment of delight early in the journey that reinforced exclusivity, premium value, and care for their users.
Rethinking Investment Input
With dollar values that could be higher than average, our stakeholders wanted an experience that lived up to the weight of this process.
Through experimental prototyping we moved from a basic numeric input and moved towards fullscreen interactions that better respected the weight of the interaction.
Action: Designing unique investment selection controls with Origami Studio that utilized haptics and full screen interactions.
Impact: Created interactions that matched the importance of the underlying action, along with respecting the potential feelings of judgement with lower values of investment.
Outcomes
New Foundation
Quick experimentation resulted in a flexible brand component in the "foil shimmer" effect, used later in buttons, icons, and hairlines.
Even as the brand this element stayed as a foundational part of the design language.
Prototyping Culture
Origami prototypes opened the door to new possibilities at MetaLab, leading me to create internal and public tutorials that raised the team’s capabilities. Other projects benefitted from the card motion prototypes and pushed those further elsewhere.
Broader Community Impact
This led to creating tutorials on YouTube that have helped others, including by being part of a curriculum at a small design school. This first step is connected to contributing to career development for several early career designers at places such as Meta and Perplexity.
Reflections
This project demonstrated the power of pushing tools and mediums to create richer user experiences. By blending high-end aesthetics with advanced interaction design, we gave The Coterie a distinct identity that influenced both its brand and its future product evolution.
