Revolut

Voices | Brand identity

An imaginary start-up called Voices, focused on voice activated financial transactions needs to launch their product in Portugal, focusing mainly in payments (local and international) and savings.

They are targeting heavily in the attraction of an adult group of consumers (25 – 35 years old), living with an average salary and not particularly tech savvy, but excited about voice control technologies and its benefits.

Brand Strategy

As branding expert Marty Neumeier says, a brand strategy is “a plan for the systematic development of brand in alignment with a business strategy.”

In order to develop a brand strategy for Voices, we need to split the process into three distinct parts: from Brand Heart (the core of the brand), to the articulation of the Brand Messaging (how to talk about who we are), to the Visual Identity (visual expression of the brand).

Brand Heart

Our Brand Heart is comprised of four elements:

Purpose: Voices was created to make financial tasks effortless, revolutionising the voice-transaction technology.
Vision: We want to revolutionise personal banking by making financial transactions faster, easier and more convenient.
Mission: Our mission is to make your life easier by creating a bridge between human voice and financial services.
Values: Our values orbit around 5 concepts: trustworthiness, boldness, playfulness, humbleness and unpretentiousness.

Brand Messaging

Our Brand Essence consist in 3 different elements: personality, voice and tone. We have to take a closer look into our target audience and Brand Heart in order to define properly our personality.

Voices personality can be define as uplifting, empowering, inviting, personal. Our brand voice then will be direct and easy-going, but keeping it smart. We want to be inviting and reach our customers with a playful tone.

Visual Identity

A strong visual identity is meant to be purposeful, our good visual identity was created to be flexible (it can easily grow with the brand), comprehensive (providing a toolkit) and intuitive (well constructed so that each element complements the other).

The visual identity explained next, gathers: Logo, Typography, Colors and Imagery.

Market Research

Starting this project, we must do an extensive market research with the main companies our brand will compete in the space. Focusing on researching those ones that already have a great presence in Portugal with same target audience. Among the most popular banks in the region, we find the followings.

From the branding perspective, we can highlight:

In 2020, Revolut released a new logo, switching it to a more simple sans type and keeping the Brandmark with the characteristic R.
Simplicity on Revolut’s colors, separating into only an accent and white, but being playful when it comes to Social Media – with high contrast colors.
Type goes in hand with their new redesign logo, using BasierCircle Typeface (Sans Serif) in all their communications.
Web and app are highlighted for their accessibility and bold colors; make them fun and easy to use.

N26

From 2018, their branding has been updated to make it more appealing to their target customer (mainly Gen Z and Millenials):

Logotype is simple and bold, and it can be found across all communications.
Colors are on the pastel tonality, with complementary tones, which help to create a wide range of colors and usages.
They keep their social media and advertisements with clear colors – mainly with the teal and its complementary – including simple 2D animations and direct texts.
Type, as happens with Revolut, stays on the Sans Serif side, using GT America.

Novobanco

As for their branding:

Logotype stays as one line type logo, with a composition in lower case , which “values the proximity and the relationship established with every audience”. It also includes the voice shapes, as “an expression for the collaborative process”, and is characteristic for its symbolism, engagement and simplicity.
Simple blue color range with an orange for accent color.
Social media communications are based on text and photography to explain benefits of the bank, and other special promotions/events.
Type, as in the other competitors, is Sans Serif based.

Monese

As for their branding, we can highlight:

Logotype and brandmark are used independently or together, which gives their brand different usabilities across their communications.
Colors are simple, using their bold blue, with accent color on green and complementary yellow.
On social media we can see heavy usage on iconography
Blue as main color, with direct, bold and simple messaging.
As for OOH and prints, they focus on highlighting their value proposition with very bold and short copy.
Type, as happens with the last two competitors, stays on the Sans Serif side.

Conclusion

For several years now, banks have been moving their customers out of their branches and onto digital channels. The reason for this is obvious. Moving process-driven interactions to digital channels and keeping more complex matters in-branch meant they saved on costs while protecting personal relationships with customers. Although many people welcomed the shift to digital, certain customer segments still preferred to visit their branch for even simple transactions.

Looking at the main competitors that Voices has in order to launch their product in Portugal, we see that the visual design has been generalised within the banking and financial-service companies. And not only within the banking field, this new clean and accessible design guidelines has been implemented in a wide range of tech companies.

As main points for our brainstorming process to create the branding for Voices, we have to take under consideration:

A) Importance of accessible design system. Is clear that these competitors are using and updating their branding elements to be accessible to everyone, maintaining all design elements clear, simple and easily adaptable.

B) Usage of owned and paid social media advertisement to promote products and build diverse digital marketing campaigns.

Core Brand elements

To craft the visual identity, we pulled inspiration from the history of bookmaking and editorial layouts. Typography scale and layout play add visual interest and are a nod to that visual research. To create a sense of a warm embrace and a spark, we developed a dynamic, painterly illustration style and emotive photography. Bringing it all together creates a brand that is uniquely Voices.

References

After gathering some visual references on visual elements, logotype, color palettes and layouts, the main takeaways were:

Heavy usage of green and blue colors across multiple range of companies – specially fields related to finance and lifestyle.
Lineart as visual support – these elements are used in order to communicate easy flowing or connecting thoughts/features.
Bold texts across media – highlighting the main features the product offers.

Logotype

A goo