VAART.
Brand, design system and homepage for a cooperative bank owned by the freelancers and small studios who bank there.
- Client
- VAART (concept)
- Year
- 2026
- Role
- Brand, design system, front-end
- Scope
- Marketing homepage
- Stack
- Figma · React · TypeScript · Tailwind CSS
01 / The problem
Big banks feel indifferent and neobanks feel disposable. Independents needed a third option.
VAART is a cooperative bank for people with irregular income: freelancers, craftspeople and firms of one to ten people across Flanders and the Netherlands. Members own it, elect the board and sit on the credit committee.
The brief asked for a bank that reads like paper, not a screen: warm, plain-spoken and honest about rates, with the unflattering number shown next to the good one.
02 / The system
Five colours, square corners, ledger rules.
Paper is the ground for everything. Ink carries the text, Water is the primary and Ochre appears once per screen at most. There are no radii and no shadows; ledger hairlines and paper tints do the work. Every number is set in mono with tabular figures.
Colour
- Paper#F4F1EA
- Ink#12212B
- Water#1F5C5B
- Ochre#C97B2C
- Soft rule#E3DCCF
Type
- Display
- Fraunces
- Body
- Inter
- Figures
- IBM Plex Mono
Corners
0 px
03 / The build
Restraint, built in.
Motion is almost absent on purpose: fades only, on one easing curve. The single exception is the income-smoothing explainer, where bars resolve into a flat line once as you scroll. Built as typed React components on the same tokens as the Figma file.
04 / Screens
Homepage sections, desktop and phone.
05 / The result
What we would measure.
VAART is a concept project, so there are no client results. These are the numbers the site was designed to move.
- 01
Membership starts
Visitors who start the four-page membership form.
- 02
Explainer reach
Share of visitors who scroll through the income-smoothing explainer.
- 03
Rate trust
Visits to the published rate-change log, a proxy for trust.
Free · 30 minutes