Starling Bank

Starling Bank

Designing Order from Chaos: Starling’s First Design System

Designing Order from Chaos: Starling’s First Design System

As Starling matured and evolved through multiple rebrands, its website struggled to keep pace. Rapid growth, shifting priorities, and contributions from multiple designers over time left behind fragmented design legacies, visual inconsistencies, and an increasingly fragile UI.

Alongside Starling’s latest rebrand, I was tasked with designing and implementing a design system from scratch — as the sole designer on the project. The goal wasn’t just to refresh the look and feel, but to establish a scalable, consistent foundation that aligned brand, UX, and engineering around a single source of truth.

Client

Starling Bank, UK

Year

2020-2024

Industry

Fintech / Neobank

Role

Lead Digital Designer

Focus

Web platform, UX/UI, growth

As Starling matured and evolved through multiple rebrands, its website struggled to keep pace. Rapid growth, shifting priorities, and contributions from multiple designers over time left behind fragmented design legacies, visual inconsistencies, and an increasingly fragile UI.

Alongside Starling’s latest rebrand, I was tasked with designing and implementing a design system from scratch — as the sole designer on the project. The goal wasn’t just to refresh the look and feel, but to establish a scalable, consistent foundation that aligned brand, UX, and engineering around a single source of truth.

Client

Starling Bank, UK

Year

2020-2024

Industry

Fintech / Neobank

Role

Lead Digital Designer

Focus

Web platform, UX/UI, growth

Exploratory motion concepts

To explore how the Starling web experience could feel more expressive and dynamic, I developed a series of motion-led concepts. These explorations focused on hierarchy, pacing, and transitions — testing how movement could reinforce clarity and brand character at scale. I experimented with the homepage as a story that unfolds as you scroll, while also looking at ways to bring motion across key product pages, flows, and interface components.

Extending the redesign across the site and social media

The redesign was applied across the full website, applying the new visual language to product pages, user journeys, and modular sections. The focus was on creating a system that felt consistent and flexible in real use — scaling smoothly across mobile, tablet, and desktop while maintaining clarity, performance, and brand character.

Impact

The redesign reshaped Starling’s digital presence stripping back unnecessary copy and letting subtle motion do the heavy lifting, while reinforcing the brand's maturity. User research validated that the experience is clearer and easier to navigate, aligned across all digital touchpoints — both in how it behaves and how it looks.