Branding in a Rapidly Growing Startup

Moves Financial Inc. (Moves) is a financial app for gig workers helping them manage their money. The original brand of Moves was created by an agency before I was onboarded. Being created by an agency had its limitations, since they created something that they would never actually have to work with. As I worked with the brand, I came to understand it, evolve it and consolidate it into the current brand guidelines.

Through weekly design meetings with the product designers, we identified some parts of the brand that needed adjusting to better prioritize the user. Referring back to research that the growth team did and collaborating with my colleagues, I put together a brand study to better understand our brand. There, we were able to identify how we could make our visual brand align with our vision.

In our original branding, there was only 1 motif - the colored squares. These squares didn’t have much meaning and came in a huge variety of forms (gradient, solid, semi transparent).

They were a good way of incorporating our secondary brand colors into designs, but I identified a few problems with them:

• The large selection of forms the squares could come in made the brand look inconsistent
• The lack of meaning in our motifs doesn’t speak to the user or allow for further conceptualization with the brand

As a solution to this, I wanted to introduce a new brand motif as the primary and leave the squares as secondary. I took a look at our logo and thought a lot about the meaning, keeping how it spoke to the user in mind.

Our logo’s concept was strong, utilizing angles in the wordmark to represent movement and being always on the go - just like our users. I wanted to take that concept and incorporate it into a brand motif, which is where I came up with the green angled motif. The angles served as a divider, as well as leading lines to entice scrolling.

Along with that, I also narrowed down the options for square motif styles. This created a much more coherent looking brand. The angles worked to create meaning and movement, while the squares brought in our brand colors.

Green is Moves’ primary brand color, which meant that our Call to Actions were green. However, I noticed that the color contrast wasn’t great and was curious to see if it passed accessibility compliance. I discovered that it did not, which led me to do some testing on color combinations since a clearer CTA would reduce user confusion and increase conversion rate.

I took a look at other companies’ CTA design with a focus on Spotify and Chime, since they also dealt with green buttons. I discovered that changing the text color to black instead of white greatly increased readability. In the end, it came down to a few color combinations. From there, I created some mockups and decided visually in collaboration with the product designers what would look best.

We decided to go with a bright green that draws the greatest attention and changed the shape to a fully rounded button for a friendlier feel.

When I started looking more towards directing the brand at Moves, there were 2 main fonts that we used. Inter as the primary and Supria Sans as the secondary.

As the brand was discussed with the stakeholders and our vision and user were further understood, we felt that there was a need to change this font pairing to better reflect Moves.

Inter as our primary gave us a nice polished tech feel, but Moves users were not that. They were energetic, hard working hustlers coming from all different types of backgrounds. Supria sans on the other hand, had the curves and angles that gave it personality.

Therefore, we decided swap the primary and secondary fonts. Supria sans being the new lead font with its wider variety of weights (namely, Heavy), gave the brand titles more volume and character. Inter as the secondary with its clean design, tidied up the body text. It was a simple switch that made a big impact on aligning our brand with the user. Below is an example of the fonts used in a video I animated and narrated.

Since these changes and the consolidation of the brand guidelines, the team has experienced greater alignment on branding. Moves has also quickly saw 50% growth in new users and 155% growth in resurrected users.