Goldman Sachs Global Visual Identity
As VP of Brand and Product at Goldman Sachs, I led a team working to re-imagine a new visual identity system for the 150 year old premier “Private Wealth Management” division of Goldman Sachs. Coinciding with the restructuring of the Consumer and Investment division to Consumer Wealth Management, our work paved the way forward for this historic brand to step into the future with a truly premium luxury aesthetic that reflects the lifestyle, locations, products, and activities that their clients engage with and the quality that they have come to expect.
The team examined the aesthetic, tone, and voice of the brand in order to create a system that would ensure visual consistency for global advisor teams in over 30 countries to create unified digital and traditional client experiences. Identifying areas of the brand that needed extreme control vs. areas that needed flexibility for designers to explore was key. An extensive color and pattern library was developed to be accessible and work on both dark and light backgrounds. Standardized basic design principles and education helped teams on appropriate usage of the brand guidelines and to quickly increase productivity in design work streams.
Adoption of the new brand guidelines started mid 2020 and quickly spread with the creation of a new credit/debit card, a new mobile app, pitch decks, financial reporting documents, and much much more.
Project Details
Type: Brand Strategy & Design
Client: Goldman Sachs
Role: Creative Director, Strategy, Design
Color System
A controlled yet flexible color system was designed to scaled across global teams, digital products, and tranditional print mediums. A disciplined core palette ensured brand consistency, while expanded tonal ranges supported charting and localized expression. Semantic color tokens were defined to map colors to functional roles (e.g., primary/seconday/tertiary, H1/2/3, positive/negative) rather than fixed values — enabling governance, dark/light mode compatibility, and cross-platform alignment. All palettes were calibrated for data visualization clarity and WCAG AA accessibility.
Global Color Implementation
To operationalize the system at scale, we integrated the color framework into the design system and the teams most used tools through shared libraries and structured color styles aligned to semantic tokens. This ensured designers, advisors, and global teams were working from the same governed palette, reducing inconsistency and eliminating manual color selection. Updates to tokens cascaded across files and products, enabling centralized control, faster iteration, and consistent brand expression across markets.
Patterns
Modular monochromatic abstract patterns and illustrations were designed for scalability across the global ecosystems and applied to things like credit cards, digital mediums, books, and presentaions. Structured color pairings and precise guidelines for cropping, composition, and application ensured brand control while enabling flexible deployment by global teams across campaigns, products, and client-facing materials.
Photography
Photography was guided by a natural, globally consistent lighting philosophy — bright, realistic, and free from artificial highlights. We emphasized predominantly monochromatic color compositions aligned to the PWM primary palette, using restrained tones with selective, organic pops of light. This approach ensured imagery felt refined, authentic, and cohesive across markets while reinforcing the brand’s ultra premium aesthetic.
Typography
In partnership with Dalton Maag, we helped bring Goldman Sans to life — a proprietary typeface engineered for clarity, authority, and modernity. Special attention was given to numeric readability and tabular alignment to ensure precision across financial data and reporting. We built a responsive typography system with defined hierarchy and usage standards, embedding it directly into Figma libraries, PowerPoint templates, and the broader design system to drive consistency and scalable adoption across global teams.
