Refreshing Happy Money’s Brand Colors
New name, new products, new look
Happy Money has grown a lot over the past year and it came time to expand and extend our brand colors as a company. We started as Payoff (a loan to pay off credit cards), added Joy (the app) and FindJoy.com (online publication), and rebranded as Happy Money to bring everything together under one common mission. With all of these changes we wanted to create a family of colors that was big enough and flexible enough to allow each product to have its own look and feel.
Color is one of my favorite elements of design. It can evoke emotion, make or break a product’s UI and help a brand stand out from the crowd. Color brings life, personality and allows a brand to uniquely express itself.
A New Pink
Pink has been our main brand color for a few years and it’s been a great tool in helping Happy Money (then Payoff) look different than all of the other financial companies out there. We wanted to keep the pink but soften it to make it feel more human and less digital.
Expanding the Color Story
Along with updating our pink, we needed more colors to be able to better express our brand’s fun and approachable tone. We needed a selection of colors to allow our products to look different from each other. We’re a lifestyle focused financial services company that actually cares about your happiness. These colors enable us to have a lot more flexibility and fun with our messaging and communication.
Mix and Match (but make it readable)
We developed a fun naming convention for the colors and set up some guidelines around how colors can and should be used together. These colors will mainly be used in social media and marketing communication but when used in an actual user interface or at smaller sizes we included some alternatives for easier reading and better contrast. Each of the combos below use the darker and lighter version of each color for better contrast.
When necessary we can use “coconut” on any of the darker background colors and “charcoal” on any of the light backgrounds. This is helpful for certain parts of websites and in app UI that need to be extra legible.
A Story Still Being Written
A company’s visual language should continue to evolve over time. These new colors are just a start and we will be continually updating and working on all things brand design to help Happy Money scale and connect with more people. ✨
Interested in learning more from Happy Money Design? Check out our team website, or follow us on Medium, Twitter, and Dribbble.
Join our team. Our small product focused design team is ready to grow! If you want to help design and code beautiful financial products that help change how people think about and use money, checkout our open positions here.
