Our visual branding has a fresh new look. It’s more friendly, more human, more Monzo.
We’ve expanded our colour palette while doubling down on our iconic brand colour, hot coral. We’ve brought in new typography and a fresh approach to our art direction and photography. And we’ve developed illustrations in a distinctive new style.
Optimism is the original spirit of Monzo
Rewind to a time where the world of banking was stuffy and dormant. The category, complacent: queues, card readers, and balances that didn’t update over the weekend.
Enter Monzo and our hot coral cards! We like to think we brought a new sense of positivity and possibility to your pockets, creating a bank that leaves you with more and helps you see money in a new light.
This optimism is the original spirit of Monzo. And it also highlights something even more valuable for the future of our brand: that Monzo feels distinctly human. Bringing warmth, empathy and friendliness to the world of banking.
These are principles we took with us when developing this refreshed look and feel.
A visual brand that’s ready for the future
A lot’s changed since we started Monzo back in 2015. We became a bank, grew the company to 2,400 people, and welcomed 6 million customers (and counting!). We’ve built dozens of new products and features, and showed up in tonnes of new places – like digital ads, emails, on TikTok and even a double-decker bus.
Trying to cover a lot, our visual branding began to show signs of strain: we felt limited by the colours and assets we had to work with. And we were losing a distinctive thread running through it all.
It was time for a refresh.
So we worked with Ragged Edge to shape our visual brand into what you see today.
We started by digging into what makes Monzo, Monzo. We audited our visual brand codes and held a series of creative workshops and interviews with people from around the business. From there, we developed and reviewed a few different directions.
Ultimately, we landed on a hot coral-heavy route centred around the optimism we’d like you to feel when you see us. Which we then fleshed out across all our brand codes.
Our fresh new look
Colour
We’re the bank with the hot coral card – 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. And we now have a vibrant range of secondary colours to support our primaries and offer extra bursts of energy when the feeling’s right.
Our icon
The Monzo M has always been the recognisable front door to our product, our website and our social channels. So we’ve kept it and given it a little make-over, to better reflect our vibrant new colours. Keep an eye out for the refreshed app icon coming to your home screen in the coming weeks.
Typography
We chose Oldschool Grotesk for our hero typeface for its warm, analog friendliness 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.
Art direction
The banking market is flooded with generic people photography. So we needed a style that was unique to Monzo.
Our new approach uses warmer hues, sunny light flares and dramatic shadows to make things feel a bit more human.
Illustration
We’ve steered our illustrations away from the popular corporate style that uses flat geometry and generic people.
We worked with illustrator Ola Dobrzyńska to bring personality, movement and energy into a new illustration style that draws you into the vibrant world of Monzo.
Exaggerated UI
Exaggerating elements of the app can help us communicate clearly, simply and add impact.
Applying our brand
When we apply our refreshed visual brand to our marketing assets, there’s a real sense of fun and playfulness you don’t find elsewhere in the banking market.
The new colours give us lots of scope for different combinations. We can still hero hot coral or navy, but inject brighter and bolder colours like teal or pink too.
What’s next?
We’ve built a system that stays true to our brand while letting us brighten up our creatives. We’ve doubled-down on key brand assets and added new elements that inject energy and excitement.
Our next task is to apply it to other places: like how we reflect it in our sub-brands like Monzo Premium or Monzo Business, and how we apply it to the app and the experience you have when you use it.