My name is Jesse and I’m a Senior Brand Designer here at Monzo. And I thought my first post on the Community should be an interesting one.
I’m here to talk about a refresh we’ve made to our visual branding!
I wanted to make sure the Community had an insight into our decisions and give you the opportunity to ask me (and the team) questions this week
This isn’t a rebrand or a repositioning, it’s essentially bringing a bit more energy to the Monzo aesthetic to help it match the business we’re becoming.
Myself and our VP of Design @Vuokko have written an indepth blog detailing the process, our decisions and the thinking behind them. You can head over and take a read here but I’ll share some of the highlights below.
Colour
We’re the bank with the hot coral card, that much is true – and it’s what helps keep us distinctive. But it’s more than that.
Hot coral represents our warmth, our empathy and our human quality. So we’ve made it the forefront of our brand, followed closely by deep navy and soft white. We now have a vibrant range of secondary colours to support our primaries, carefully selected to maximise accessibility and to provide extra bursts of energy when the feeling is right.
App icon
The Monzo M has always been the recognisable front door to our product, our website and our social channels. So we’re keeping it but giving it a glow-up to better reflect our vibrant new colours.
Typography
Our typography welcomes Monzo users to interact, understand and be part of a more friendly banking experience. We chose Oldschool Grotesk for our hero typeface as it has a warm, analog friendliness to it and bold curves that hark back to the days of wood-block printing.
Our functional typeface is Monzo Sans, a custom cut of Universal Sans, meaning it’s unique to Monzo. We chose it for maximum readability, with generous dots and curled ends.
Exaggerated UI
There are various ways we showcase features of our app depending on what needs to be communicated. This is an example of how we can take things one step further to add impact or create a feeling around specific features.
Shout outs
This project would not be possible without the direction of our Senior Brand Designer, Samantha Shaw, leadership of Vuokko Aro and Sarah Conrad, Heldiney Pereira and our vigilant Product Design team, and last but not least Rebecca Goldbeck, our PM at the helm of rolling it all out and into your hands.
Look forward to any questions you all have - I’ll do my best to answer them
I have no real idea how branding/design works on a large scale, but in my head, you’re a Senior Brand Designer, so presumably there’s non seniors in that role, there’s a VP of Design, you must have quite a few talented people in your team/s, what extra do you need from an external company?
Hey Revels! The creative direction for the refresh comes from a collaboration between our Marketing and Design teams, and Ragged Edge who specialise in branding and brand strategy. We might’ve been able to do it all ourselves, but A, it would’ve take much much longer, and B, it’s also great to engage outside perspectives and expertise when defining a brand. We’re all so ‘in it’ at Monzo, so it’s great to have creative people working from the outside looking in.
I LOVE the fun typography and the exaggerated UI (wish the app was completely redesigned around this playful style) - really not sure about the logo re-colouring! I’m not a huge fan of the neon yellow/green - but all the other colours pop!
Not quite Peter These are examples of how we can showcase some of the in-app features across marketing assets. E.g if we run an ad that references bill splitting, we could use exaggerated UI that simplifies / enlarges some of the in-app UI so it’s easier to digest on a piece of advertising.
However, you could expect some of the above colours to start appearing in the app experience in time
Could you talk a bit about when you intend to use the logotype (is that the right word? I mean the “monzo” name that we see on monzo.com or the cards) and when you use the M logo? Can we expect to see it on cards etc?
Like this refresh @jessec and thank you for popping over onto the community to let us know. Especially like the new neon logomarque (now please change the emoji here )
Would appreciate it if this language transferred into the app, it seems to work great on a phone screen size and ratio.
I like the direction this took. The colours look great and I’m pleased that you didn’t feel like a complete rebrand was needed (like, let’s say, The Verge)
This is a bit disappointing though – the interface could do with a little simplification on top of more neon
These are examples of how we can showcase some of the in-app features across marketing assets. E.g if we run an ad that references bill splitting, we could use exaggerated UI that simplifies / enlarges some of the in-app UI so it’s easier to digest on a piece of advertising.
logomarque (now please change the emoji here 
)