The retainer became the team.

The thing that changes the relationship

Two weeks into the first sprint, before it was formally over, I wrote Mitul a message nobody asked for. Not about the card flow. About the product’s visual identity. The argument was simple: Open Wallet’s illustration style was too close to Trust Wallet. Same flat vectors, similar palette, similar rendering logic. It wasn’t hurting anything, but it wasn’t building anything either — the product had no visual signature a user would remember or a competitor couldn’t replicate overnight.

I proposed a shift to 3D. More flexibility, more identity, motion-friendly assets for onboarding, a natural bridge to their planned physical cards. Mitul’s response: he personally didn’t love the current illustrations either. Felt they were disconnected from real-world objects because of how flat everything was.

This was the first moment we stopped being contractors executing a brief. Nobody asked us to evaluate the visual language. Nobody put “3D exploration” in the sprint scope. We saw something we could fix, built the case, and proposed it. The second sprint already included the 3D direction as a formal deliverable.

There wasn’t one clean moment where the relationship shifted. But I’d mark this as the point where the pattern locked in: we show up with ideas, not deliverables. Everything after was that pattern repeating.

The brand that started as a website

Mitul asked us to update the website. “Continue with website for the moment” — that was the brief. What we delivered was a visual identity for the entire product. He sent references he liked: family.co, phantom.com, coinbase.com/wallet, strike.me. We looked at all of them and pushed back — they felt too playful, too startup, too crypto. We’d agreed on moving Open Wallet away from that territory, and these references were pulling it right back.

The concept I built started from Frutiger Aero. Not the visual language — not the reflections and transparency and gloss — but the philosophy underneath it. The reason Frutiger Aero worked wasn’t the shiny surfaces. It was the idea that technology should feel like clear sky, like open space, like something made for people with lives and errands and Tuesday mornings. That’s what I wanted for Open Wallet, stripped of the decorative layer and rebuilt for 2025.

Blue sky as the visual anchor — not a dark crypto interface but a light, warm space. Real people — AI-generated at photographic quality, retouched to studio-shoot standards, each carrying an Open Wallet username, surrounded by floating UI fragments that show features in context. And usage scenarios instead of feature lists, because the point of Open Wallet isn’t that you can transfer crypto to a card — it’s what that capability lets you do with your afternoon. Same logic as buying an expensive jacket: you’re not paying for the jacket, you’re paying for how you feel wearing it.

Mitul wanted a version without the people. I wrote him a long message explaining why that would gut the concept — remove the humans and you lose the story, and the site turns into a feature showcase that could belong to any wallet. We built both versions and shipped both to Framer so he could compare on a live site.

Then a user sent Mitul feedback criticizing the visual direction, and Mitul forwarded it to us. I was direct: user interviews are 99% noise. The second you ask a random person what they think about a design, they step into an expert role they’re not qualified for, feel pressured to sound smart, and start inventing opinions. Bounce rates, conversions, deposits — that’s the data.

Alice backed this up with a visual comparison: one design built on team instinct, one built on “best practices” and user feedback. The difference was obvious. The site shipped. Stakeholders loved it. And the visual language we’d created for a website — the sky, the people, the warmth — migrated into the app, into promo videos, into partner decks, into app store screenshots. A deliverable that started as “update the website” became the brand.