Vela
A credit card that pays you in the things you already love. Vela turns everyday card spend into heartbeats, a currency you spend on festivals, tables, trips and nights out, not on airline miles you never redeem.
The problem
Points are a promise nobody keeps.
Cashback is invisible. Miles expire. Every rewards programme in the region competes on the same abstract number, and the number never becomes an evening you remember. Meanwhile the people the card is for, 25 to 40, four festivals a year, dinner out on Thursday, are already spending on exactly the things a card could be buying them.
So the brief inverted. Instead of a card with rewards bolted on, design a rewards product that happens to be a card. That decision drove everything: the onboarding asks what you love before it asks for a number, the currency is called heartbeats, and the home screen leads with the next experience rather than the balance.
Passions first
Eight tracks picked at signup retune earn rates, catalog, coach and drops.
One currency
Heartbeats earn faster where you already spend, and only buy experiences.
Never abstract
Every balance is shown as distance to a specific thing you want.
The product
Thirteen screens, in the order a member meets them.
Ask what they love before asking for a number.
Three full-bleed slides make one promise, then the only real question: pick your passions. Those picks are not decoration. They set the accelerated earn categories, reorder the catalog, choose the coach’s opening line and decide which drops you even see. A money goal follows, so the coach has something to optimise for.
Eight passion tracks, each with its own earn rate, fund name and greeting.
Lead with the next night out, not the balance.
Home puts money on top in one glance: balance, this month, pace. Then it hands the rest of the screen to the experience you are closest to. Heartbeats get their own wallet, a ledger of where they came from, a pace line against your goal, and a running answer to the only question that matters. How far off am I.
Every balance is rendered as distance to a named thing, never as a bare number.
A catalog that is mostly yours already.
The catalog opens on For you, filtered by passion, priced in hearts with a plain-language reason it is there. Detail pages carry three ways in: redeem outright, enter the raffle, or pool with friends, because the best experiences cost more hearts than one person earns. Pooling turns the ceiling into a group problem.
Redeem, raffle, pool. The same object, three economics.
A coach that answers with an action, not a chart.
The assistant opens on a standing brief: what changed, what it costs you, what it recommends. Every reply lands as a card with one button and a receipt of what it did. Insights stay narrow on purpose, one pattern per screen, phrased as a sentence. Round-ups and merchant discounts sweep into pots, so a saved 8% becomes an invested 8%.
Every recommendation ships with the action attached and the money named.
The app changes shape when you arrive.
On the day, the product stops being a wallet. Festival mode surfaces set times, the site map, your tab and the pass you show at the door. Everything else recedes. Afterwards a recap closes the loop the industry usually leaves open: what the night cost, what it earned back, and what that puts within reach next.
Context-triggered mode, then a receipt that makes the reward model felt.
One product, four banks, no redesign.
Card controls stay boring on purpose. Freeze, reveal, limits, per-merchant rules, because trust is built in the least exciting screen. Behind it all sits the white-label layer: a single accent token set drives six derived values, so a partner bank swaps identity without touching a layout. Four issuer themes shipped in the prototype.
Six accent tokens, four issuer themes, zero layout forks.
The system
Built to be re-skinned, not rebuilt.
Near-black grounds keep photography, the product in a sense, the only bright thing on screen. A display face carries the promises; one humanist sans carries every balance and label. Colour is deliberately thin: a single accent family expanded into six derived tokens, plus two fixed semantics for hearts and money.
Bricolage Grotesque 800 for promises and headlines only. Manrope 400–800 for balances, labels, everything else. Five issuer accents, plus fixed heart-coral and gold.
Outcome
The hard part: making a currency feel real
Hearts only work if you can always see what they buy. Every surface that shows a balance also names the thing it is short of. That one rule rewrote home, the wallet and the coach.
What shipped
A prototype a bank can hold. Twenty-six live states, four issuer identities and eight passion configurations in one build, enough for a partner to see their own card in it rather than imagine it. Handed off to developers.
What I’d test next
Whether pooling survives contact. Pooling is the mechanic that unlocks the expensive experiences and the one most likely to break socially. Next round is a moderated test on splitting, dropping out and who owns the ticket.
Screens
Sixteen of the twenty-six. Click to select, double-click to open full size.
01-onboarding.jpg
02-pick-your-passions.jpg
03-home.jpg
04-heartbeats-wallet.jpg
05-rewards-catalog.jpg
06-experience-detail.jpg
07-heartbeat-pool.jpg
08-ai-coach.jpg
09-roundups-investing.jpg
10-festival-mode.jpg
11-post-event-recap.jpg
12-card-and-controls.jpg
13-issued-by.jpg
14-pass.jpg
15-tiers.jpg
16-drops.jpg