Quaystone

Introduction

Quaystone advises people on the biggest financial decisions of their lives - pensions, protection, the things you only get right once. It launched as a brand-new firm with nothing but a name and a founder with a strong personal reputation. Nearly all its business comes by word of mouth, so by the time someone looks the firm up, they've already been told 'these are people you can trust.' My job was to build the entire first impression - brand, identity, and site - so it lived up to the introduction that sent them there.

Starting from the client's references

The founder came with a clear sense of the feeling he wanted, pointing to established providers like Zurich and Standard Life - big, credible institutions that signal trust and stability. But those sites speak in an institutional voice, not a personal one: heavy corporate-blue palettes, dense product grids, a distant tone. Quaystone is the opposite kind of firm - small, personal, referral-led.

So the brief became clear: keep the credibility of those established brands, but deliver it with a more modern, warmer, more personal feel. Working through audience with the founder sharpened it further - alongside the loyal referral base, he wanted to reach a slightly younger, planning-ahead audience making their first serious pension decisions. Modern enough to feel relevant to them, grounded enough to reassure everyone else. That ruled out the category's go-to imagery: stock shots of retired couples, which he felt made pensions look dated. The visuals moved towards quieter, forward-looking images instead.

Credibility worth borrowing - a tone worth avoiding.

The bridge

The name already held the idea: a quay is a crossing point, stone is something solid and permanent. But the bridge came to mean more than the name - it symbolises what Quaystone actually does for people: carrying them from where they are now to where they want to be in the future, across decisions that feel daunting to make alone. I designed the logo and wordmark around that idea - a clean, grounded mark that nods to a quay without being literal, built to look like it's been around for years even though the firm is brand new.

Colour did strategic work too. Blue is the most trust-associated colour in finance - dependable, calm - so it anchored the palette for a reason. But pure corporate blue is exactly what makes advisory brands feel cold, so I deepened it and paired it with a warmer accent and soft neutral grounds: trustworthy without faceless.

Where design met reality

Built on Squarespace so the client could edit it himself - but the brief pushed past what the platform does out of the box. The sharpest example: regulation requires a clear Scale of Fees, but Squarespace's default table collapsed into a mess on mobile, exactly where most people would read it. I custom-coded a responsive HTML/CSS table that reflowed into clean, labelled rows on small screens - compliant and legible. The same care went into the compliance pages, a hand-built responsive footer with SVG icons, and a fixed email-signature logo - the unglamorous details that separate 'a website' from a finished product.

quaystone.ie

Set up to be found

A referral's first move is often to Google the name to check the firm is real - and if nothing shows up, the doubt creeps back in. So discoverability was part of the job, not an afterthought. I verified the site in Google Search Console and submitted its sitemap so every page could be indexed, wrote unique page titles and meta descriptions so results read clearly, and kept the URL structure, headings and alt text clean and descriptive.