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Monese Design System
Key achievements
Upon joining Monese I was tasked to lead a company rebrand which would lay strong foundations for its rapid future growth. The goal of the new brand was to position Monese's identity in the market in a way which reflects its unique offering and ethos.
I began the project by investigating new brand values and visual concepts, through to the design of a fully unique brand system consisting of a new logo, colour palette, typography, illustration, iconography, photography, and a full product redesign. All of which would later form the core brand identity for many years to follow.
Brand values
Defining a set of brand values was a really important first step for us as it gave us a solid base to judge all future design decisions against. To create our values I connected with everyone across the business and asked them to come up with the values they believe represent Monese. From this we then distilled the results down to three top values: Progressive, Human and Trustworthy.
Logo
The Monese logo features a series of flowing and interconnecting lines which overlap each other to represent a secure and dynamic network, whilst maintaining a friendly human feel. Its flowing linear form pays homage to the filigrees found printed in physical paper money across the world.
Colour palette
I wanted our palette to have a uniquely energising feel, whilst choosing colours that could clearly communicate elements of the banking service across all languages. We chose a vibrant green, blue and yellow, taking care to ensure they could work clearly on both a dark and light background.
I then defined a secondary palette, taking into account the various states of information we would need to communicate within the application such as errors and warnings.
Typography
Our typeface — FF Mark — was chosen for its carefully crafted glyphs that give it a strong, simple and bold edge with a reassuring and friendly feel, which helps to marry it well with the rounded forms of the Monese logo mark.
Typographic approach
A large part of our audience are non-native English speakers, meaning legibility is paramount to our typographic communication. FF Mark's large x-height helps it work clearly in small sizes within user interface elements. We use three weights of FF Mark to allow for a clear hierarchy and consistent look and feel across our communications.
Three weights, one voice
Consistent use of FF Mark Regular, Medium and Bold — paired with clear scale and spacing rules — let teams across product and marketing produce content that always sounded like Monese.
Iconography
Our iconography style plays off the rounded, friendly and human forms from the Monese logo, and retains a consistent line weight throughout the entire set. We worked meticulously to craft each icon to embody a sense of character, whilst ensuring not to be too intricate so as to maintain clarity and visibility on small screen sizes and lower resolutions.
Illustration
Our illustrations are some of our most valuable brand assets, used to deliver a quick message to our users when their time is limited. We know how little users like to read long streams of body text, especially if they're on the move. With this in mind, we try to include a sense of playful character in our illustrations. This helps the message land in a way that lightens the mood of what could otherwise feel like a piece of dry messaging you'd find in many traditional banking applications.
Photography
Finance is a huge part of our daily lives, and we aim to capture the natural essence of life within the photography we use across our communications. Including images of normal people in unstaged environments, in their normal clothes, going about their normal lives can lead to excellent photographs when taken at the right moment from angles outside of the ordinary. We aim for these natural lifestyle shots to help build a brand that feels relatable and trustworthy.
