FIRST BOULEVARD

First Boulevard (Kinly since January 2023, now acquired by Greenwood Bank)* is a modern financial technology company building generational wealth for Black America. Though unbanked, underbanked and underserved, the Black community’s $1.4 trillion in annual economic impact provides a significant base to build upon. By providing a platform focused on improving financial livelihood through incentive-based financial education, Black-focused spending, and automated wealth building. In August 2021, First Boulevard completed a $15 Million Series A with Point72 Ventures which brought their total funding to $20 Million. First Boulevard was founded in 2020 and officially launched in 2021 following an initial $5 Million seed round led by Barclays.

My Role at First Boulevard was to be a central backbone to the creative department as the single senior graphic designer for this startup, with art directions duties as well, working closely with the following department: communication, product, finance education program, social media team, developing assets across multiple platforms such as web, social media, video, digital and print. As a startup, this company moves fast—between the time I’ve worked for them, between 2020 to 2022, the company went through three entire rebranding process and I was part of them all, as we were updating visuals as the company was evolving in real time as it is common amongst startups. It was a big challenge for all of us involved, but yet, a real pleasure to help them foster a community and achieve their goals. Here, you can see the first rebranding phase before the company changed their brand name from First Boulevard to kinly. The company nowadays belongs to Greenwood Banking group.*

Logo design

Branding, podcast

Card art

App loading page, commemorative, template design

Marketing material, template design

Above: Email communication campaign, template design
Bellow: Founders web page and blog

First Boulevard rebranding / transitioning. The first iteration of the brand, seeing above, was designed to appeal to potential investors, as the first phase of this Fintech startup. With that, the company was able to generate investments enough to achieve its main goals: to put together a solid team of product engineers to build the app and the social media channels—the company had two main channels focused to build community, their podcast Money & Sense, and a video based Finance Education Program with Dr. Melody Wright driven to social medias. At this point the company had less than a year to hit the market as a public enterprise.

Name changing. At this phase where the startup was getting ready to hit the market, there was an impediment with trade marketing the name First Boulevard so the company decided to go under a transitional phase seeing here—at this time, there were already some brand equity built under that name amongst investors and social media followers, so that strategy seems safer since the company had some time until hitting the public sphere with their app.

Above: New logo, new logo applications for digital, and collateral material
Bellow: Rebranding of the podcast Dollars & Sense, Spotify and social media channels

Above: Digital brochure

Above: Social Media templates

Above: Finance Education Program, social media

Above: Data visualization.

Above: Finance Education Program, social media, video template

Bellow: Founders page

Above: First Boulevard to Kinly, name changing, product launch, public campaign. Video production by Visa

Client: First Boulevard (now Kinly, acquired by Greenwood Bank)
Location: Austin, Texas, remote
Keywords: Art direction, digital design, card carriers, print production, web assets, templates
In-house design, 2020-2022