Portfolio

Hazel AI

2025


The brief

Altruist was launching Hazel, a new AI assistant built specifically for financial advisors, and needed a visual identity to match. The challenge was building something that felt rooted in Altruist's evolving brand system while still standing on its own, as a product that could exist independently, speak to a broader audience, and hold up across both marketing and product surfaces.

My role

I designed the brand elements and corresponding marketing moments for this project, working closely with a product designer, product creative, copywriter, illustrator, and creative director. I collaborated with product and marketing leads and legal/compliance to make sure everything aligned with the company mission, the Hazel roadmap, and regulatory requirements.

The team

Daniel Haire, Robert Manukyan, Gokul Ramanathan, Fernando San Martin, Abigail Spooner, Jacob Grubbe, Steve Kane, Bee Gray, Cole Cradduck



Setting context

Altruist is a digital custodian platform built exclusively for financial advisors. Around the time of this project, Altruist had just completed a major rebrand with Collins, a new identity designed to strip away complexity and communicate with clarity and conviction. Hazel needed to feel like a natural extension of that system while carving out its own space.

Hazel is Altruist's AI assistant: more than a notetaker, it handles scheduling, email drafting, meeting prep, document parsing, and contextual Q&A, all with an advisor's specific context built in.



Creative concept

We landed on "Sky's the Limit" as the overarching creative direction. The idea: there's so much advisors can accomplish with Hazel, and we wanted the visual language to reflect that sense of possibility: expansive, open, limitless. This translated into two visual registers working together: vast, immersive skyscapes as the brand's emotional backdrop, and detailed UI moments that show exactly how the product works in practice.


Wordmark

We used the design principles of the Altruist wordmark as a foundation and built from there. The Hazel logo needed to feel visually and creatively connected to Altruist, but still distinct. Since Hazel can be used by any advisor regardless of whether they custody with Altruist, the two brands needed to coexist without being locked together.

The wordmark went through an initial design pass followed by a refinement round: tightening kerning, reducing the width of the "h," and adding a curve to the "e + l" ligature to match the character of the "a." The letters connect only at the top of the x-height, with staggered connection points across the word, a subtle nod to an AI tool that organizes and sequences.


Brand mark

Alongside the wordmark, we developed a secondary brand mark, a pinwheel glyph, that can represent Hazel without the full logo lockup. The shape is symbolically tied to the creative concept: the sky, wind, constant movement, effortlessness. And it's literally built from the letterforms; the shapes that make up the wheel are derived from the "a" in both the Altruist and Hazel wordmarks.

The glyph was designed with motion in mind from the start. It has multiple animated states: a simple loop, a "wind" loop, and a "thinking" state, which let us inject moments of personality into the product experience. We tested early marks in live product environments to make sure they held up at small sizes and felt distinctive at a glance.


Wordmark

We used the design principles of the Altruist wordmark as a foundation and built from there. The Hazel logo needed to feel visually and creatively connected to Altruist, but still distinct. Since Hazel can be used by any advisor regardless of whether they custody with Altruist, the two brands needed to coexist without being locked together.

The wordmark went through an initial design pass followed by a refinement round: tightening kerning, reducing the width of the "h," and adding a curve to the "e + l" ligature to match the character of the "a." The letters connect only at the top of the x-height, with staggered connection points across the word, a subtle nod to an AI tool that organizes and sequences.


Brand mark

Alongside the wordmark, we developed a secondary brand mark, a pinwheel glyph, that can represent Hazel without the full logo lockup. The shape is symbolically tied to the creative concept: the sky, wind, constant movement, effortlessness. And it's literally built from the letterforms; the shapes that make up the wheel are derived from the "a" in both the Altruist and Hazel wordmarks.

The glyph was designed with motion in mind from the start. It has multiple animated states: a simple loop, a "wind" loop, and a "thinking" state, which let us inject moments of personality into the product experience. We tested early marks in live product environments to make sure they held up at small sizes and felt distinctive at a glance.


Waitlist landing page

The first version of the Hazel site lacked clarity around what the product actually does and why it's right for advisors. Our goal was to fix that: deliver a more polished waitlist experience with a stronger value proposition, dynamic product animations, and a visual system that felt alive.

We anchored the page with a rotating headline ("Hazel is your meeting assistant / calendar assistant / inbox assistant / research assistant / client relationship assistant") so visitors immediately understood the breadth of what Hazel can do. The sky imagery ran throughout, keeping the brand feeling cohesive while the product UI moments lower on the page grounded everything in reality.


Product animations

We developed four Lottie animations for the landing page, each capturing a core advisor use case: task and meeting prioritization, meeting notes captured and summarized, emails auto-drafted from context, and Hazel answering anything using advisor-specific data. These ran as part of the scrolling product showcase on the waitlist site.


Impact

The identity shipped under a compressed 4-week timeline. Despite the time pressure and the inherent tension between expressive brand identity and a minimalist product UI, the system landed with strong alignment across product, brand, and GTM teams.

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