The last big design change that Fintual had had was in 2020, when we changed the logo. At that time we had around 24,000 clients: today we have more than 128,000. That’s why we knew it was necessary to do a big redesign. Carrying it out would be leaving “brand puberty”, leaving behind that moment when you grow up, but your arms are too long for your body and your face has not yet fully formed.
Paul Rand, one of the greatest icons of corporate design, and who probably sounds familiar to you because he created the famous IBM logo, said that a good logo design promises you a story, even if it doesn’t tell you. It is something more sinuous, less literal.
It excites you that behind that logo there is a story. To that, Rand added that a good logo also gives you the pleasure of being able to recognize it. I think that as designers, there is no greater fulfillment than generating in people that pleasure of recognizing a style: “That’s very Coca-Cola”, “That looks like Apple did it”, feeling that you can reconnect with the brand even in places where it is not, because you remember it.
And in an interview about what it was like to work with Rand, Steve Jobs said that he managed to make logos that are jewels, because they manage to be symbols that can even be used independently and autonomously, outside of the logo itself.
For us, these three elements (pleasure of recognition, being a symbol and promising a story) are what any demanding brand that decides to renew its image would want to fulfill, and for Fintual it was the minimum. It wasn’t going to be easy.
The isotype as a symbol and pieces of a puzzle
To achieve this redesign we had a very good base: our isotype
The isotype was made up of:
- 11⁄4 of circumference that serves as an abstraction of the negative of an exponential growth curve, and that connects us with the concepts of investment and growth.
- And the circle marks at its central point the end of the growth curve, symbolizing the moment in which our clients achieve their goals.
We wanted this symbolic presence of the isotype to gain more strength, so we rescued the geometric figures that compose it and incorporated them into the structure of the logo’s typography:
But the figures would not stop there: they would be the pieces of a puzzle to assemble all the icons that would go within the Fintual application, like a visual alphabet that, with minimal elements, would allow us to compose images with different levels of complexity. It is similar to a dissection puzzle: a type of riddle where a specific geometric figure is divided into pieces that must be reassembled in a certain way to obtain another specific figure.
Something we like about dissection puzzles is that they have been used to prove theorems such as Pythagoras’ or the treatise Ostomachionattributed to Archimedes, and since the 19th century they became popular as a pedagogical tool to teach mathematics.
That made sense to us: adding a didactic aspect to something abstract and complex like finances is something that also defines Fintual’s identity.
The influence of Susan Kare to make a user-friendly interface
Susan Kare, the creator of the most recognized collection of pictographs in Apple’s history, not only created a recognizable and symbolic visual identity, but her icon library integrated into the interface and facilitated the user experience:
Inspired by their work, our icon library is also made to communicate more efficiently and clearly what you find in the app:
Susan Kare’s icons are said to have been one of the many inspirations for the emoji language, and it’s easy to see the connection. But they had an authentic identity and that she was univocally associated with Apple, she managed to get the brand recognized by seeing any cute pixelated icon that she resembled. That’s why we thought the smart thing to do would be to move away from the generic look of emojis in this redesign, and create something of our own that could eventually generate the thought “that’s very Fintual.”
A new complementary typography
We have always used the Poppins font in the app because it has a simple geometry that makes it easy to read and displays the numbers in a friendly way. But we wanted to add a complementary font, the same one you are reading now: EB Garamond, the famous font from Fintualist. This typeface used by the Gazeta de México, a publication from 1722 created to disseminate news, today has great historical value: as we explain in this postwhere we tell about the design of FintualistDespite all the technological advances in the development of letters, Garamond remains one of the most legible and beneficial typefaces for reading.
It seems to us that this mix of simplicity/efficiency of Poppins (something very typical of our app) is well complemented by a classic typography that recognizes the importance of learning from history to understand investments. For example, markets, despite having gone through two World Wars, always tend to grow and are resilient like this typography.
Which implies a rebranding
Remaking the image of a brand (or better known in design as rebranding), when done well, not only redefines the identity of that brand, but also becomes a design philosophy that permeates the consciousness of the company and of the public. At least that’s what writer Mark Favermann said in Art New England magazine about Rand’s redesign of IBM. And maybe he would say it about ours, if he realized that now they are going to remember us when they see a Tangram puzzle.
