Kayne Anderson Rudnick

A new brand and digital home for a leader in financial services.

KAR is a boutique Wealth Management and Institutional Investment firm with over $40 Billion in assets under management. They came to us to create a new brand and digital experience for their company that communicates the intelligence, integrity, and highly personal professionalism that underscore all their services, and makes them such trusted partners for their clients.
Brand/Website — Visit KAR

Striking a balance in the brand

The new logo articulates a number of brand objectives in a carefully constructed balance. The mark presents the firm’s letters as if unfolding from a single material, connoting the collaborative and integrated approach of the company. The use of color creates a slight, playful sense of depth, lightening the logo, and providing a friendly feeling for a customer-service-driven business. Balanced around the mountain shaped A in its center, the logo articulates a dynamic feeling of reaching, alluding to the energy and ambitions of the firm and its clients, and the pinnacle it has achieved.

Colors for confidence

The color palette reinforces the brand’s confidence with cool and understated tones, that are both restrained, yet organic and approachable.

Imagery for abstract thinking

We urged the client to steer clear from the ubiquitous, cliché images of mountains and natural landscapes that wash so many financial services firms of their personality.

Instead, we developed a creative direction around KAR’s core intellectual capital. KAR analyzes value, quality, and investments revealing details unseen by the rest of us. To play with this concept, we chose photography that captures abstract close-ups of the textures of natural materials. The familiar is transformed into its most fundamental, microscopic properties, revealing its true, underlying nature.

A digital experience of the KAR mind

KAR’s differentiator is their intellectual capital – which comes down to ideas and brains. They are distinguished by the philosophy and strategic approaches that guide their judgements, and the people that form their brain trust.

We felt that the best way to understand KAR, is to enter the mind of the company, and we conceived of a website to do just that. The homepage and the business area landing pages are designed as a tapestry of the ideas that govern their decisions, the values that steer their culture and client relationships, the strategic approaches that fuel their returns, the articles and analyses that have positioned them as thought leaders, and the dynamic individuals who make this all possible.

Simple expressions of complex ideas

The website dives deeply into the operating philosophy and strategic approaches of their investments, investment products, and wealth management businesses. Articulating their ideas graphically, we were able to effectively communicate highly complex ideas in a form that is easily digestible to an internet audience.

Featured Insights areas share the intellectual wealth of their analysis and articles in an efficient, user-friendly design.

Professional and highly personal

The people behind KAR are a true pleasure to work with, and the company is known for its highly personal relationships with its clients.

As a numbers-based business that is highly people focused business, we wanted to make sure that the presentation of the KAR’s teams communicated their personalities. We worked with the immensely talented photographer Theo Jamison to create portraits in which the real people shine through in a way that is both professional and thoughtful, yet warm and inviting. It is an approach we carried over into the content strategy, and created fun facts about each person that appear on rollover, and lead to bio pages that balance professional experience with a broad prospective of personal interests.

“We have received such positive feedback on the new site and branding. The overwhelming amount of comments have been centered around how fresh, modern, warm, and friendly the new site and branding are. People have also been very complimentary on the ease of navigation for such a large website. These are the challenges we set out to accomplish with the site and they were all achieved… We are all very proud of the final product and we thank you for all of your contributions to making the site and branding so successful.”

Stephanie Gillman
Managing Director, Institutional Client Services
Kayne Anderson Rudnik