When fintech startup Hermetica decided to build a brand for crypto-native investors, they faced a familiar challenge:
How do you communicate trust, transparency, and technical credibility without blending into a sea of sameness among hundreds of identical financial products?
This was the challenge put before Dmitry Lepisov and Arthur Skripnik, the team at Lepisov Branding. They didn’t just need to create a visual identity, they wanted a complete brand system.
A system that would scale across marketing collateral, product UI, and social media while still allowing for flexibility, speed, and staying true to the brand ethos.
Hermetica's branding system in action
Designing for a new kind of financial audience
Hermetica develops crypto-based financial products, including a crypto wallet and their own stable coin.
“Finance is traditionally a visually boring niche,” Dmitry explains.
The team knew from the beginning that visuals would not be enough. They would need depth, motion, and interactive design without sacrificing speed or performance.
"Hermetica’s brand needed to look serious and trustworthy, but also unique and creative enough to stand out."
Dmitry Lepisov
Founder at Lepisov Branding
Hermetica's branding system allowed for quick variations on promo videos
How a 3D coin turned into an entire visual system
The project began fairly small - with one pitch deck.
Arthur designed a single 3D coin in Spline: dark, minimal, and tactile. It was meant to support the story, not define the brand. The coin was for the investor pitch deck, but the response was immediate:
"We showed it to the founders, and they were impressed. They asked if we could bring that same 3D style into social media. Then into the website. And ultimately, to the product's UI."
Dmitry Lepisov
Founder at Lepisov Branding
What began as a small project, quickly evolved into a complete 3D-driven system that was built entirely with Spline.
Hermetica's website and promo videos using its new brand system
Building a brand system & language
To keep the visual language and style consistent as the project scaled, the design team developed a framework that would maintain flexibility and speed while establishing a unique brand identity following a unified concept:
Macro - a single, highly detailed 3D token representing Hermetica’s core product.
Mezzo - stacks and rows of coins used for product features and narratives.
Micro - thousands of small elements forming wave-like patterns to reflect market volatility and trends.
Visual representation of the Macro, Mezzo and Micro framework
This brand system was created to develop the storytelling narrative behind the brand so every campaign and post followed similar logic.
The framework allowed Hermetica’s internal team to work independently without breaking visual consistency because rules were already embedded in the system.
"When Hermetica saw these graphics, for them it looked magical. We created something useful, so we're happy with that."
Arthur Skripnik
Co-Creative Director at Lepisov Branding
Why Spline fit the workflow
Spline’s import and export capabilities — spanning images, video, and SVGs — enabled a fast, flexible workflow where existing assets could be adapted and reused across multiple outputs.
Spline wasn’t just a 3D tool. It became the production environment and operating system for the brand.
Dashboard elements extruded to 3D in Spline
For Arthur, the appeal was immediate:
State-based animation
Real-time rendering
One place to design, animate, and prepare assets for multiple production outputs
For Dmitry, it transformed collaboration. Instead of reviewing wireframes and static renders, he could see fully interactive scenes instantly, leave comments directly in the file, or adjust elements himself.
The same was true for the Hermetica team, who could open a link and experience the work in context. This led to reviews becoming faster and decisions becoming clearer.
"With the rules we set in place, the Hermetica team could open the Spline files, tweak things like camera perspective, and then export it easily."
Arthur Skripnik
Co-Creative Director at Lepisov Branding
Speed without sacrificing performance
Hermetica often shipped on tight timelines. New features, dashboards, campaigns...
“We had situations where the client said, ‘We have one week to introduce this’ and Spline helped us deliver super fast”.
To meet one of those tight deadlines, the team built a complete promotional video directly in Spline, handling animation and rendering in real time without relying on traditional 3D rendering pipelines.
"It was easy because we just imported some dashboard elements, extruded them, added some lights, and it was so fast to create captivating visuals."
Arthur Skripnik
Co-Creative Director at Lepisov Branding
Promo video for Hermetica's newly launched app, animated in Spline
Another challenge of this project was building visually rich scenes that wouldn’t impact site performance.
To create the 'Micro' animation, Arthur engineered an ultra-lightweight solution: a single triangular component, duplicated thousands of times using Spline’s cloner feature. One material. One component. Thousands of instances.
The final scene weighed just 7-10 KB and scored well in performance optimization tests. Yet, it still felt sophisticated, dynamic, and alive.
Consolidation that simplifies everything
Spline allowed the team to work across mediums without breaking flow:
Interactive website scenes embedded directly.
Product UI promo videos rendered in real time.
Social animations built from the same core assets.
PNGs exported from Spline to build the brand guidelines.
If Hermetica’s internal team needed variations, they could open the source files, adjust camera angles, and export new assets without starting from scratch.
The handoff was as flexible as the design system itself. Spline made speed a feature, not a tradeoff.
Ideas could move from concept to production while the creative momentum was still there. No long rendering queues. No fractured workflow. No re-explaining intent across tools.
"When creating something, the most important thing is momentum. You don't want to lose it. Spline helps us visualize and bring our ideas to life in no time."
Dmitry Lepisov
Founder at Lepisov Branding
Get started with Spline
By compressing timelines and removing friction, Lepisov Branding delivered higher-quality work faster, with fewer handoffs and fewer compromises.
And once Hermetica saw what “fast” could look like at this level, expectations shifted: “Spline raised the bar for Hermetica. Now they know what quality can be achieved in such a short time.”
Spline made it possible to build a brand system that was expressive, performant, and scalable without slowing down the people building it.