A year ago, we launched Mono and we've grown rapidly since. Our vision to power businesses with access to financial data, and more recently, direct bank payments, to create better financial experiences for their customers has progressed with a lot of learning.
As we continue to build more financial data solutions for fast-growing, innovative companies in Nigeria and the African continent, it is important for our brand identity to catch up with this evolution.
The Mono Brand
When you're building out a startup, more focus is [rightly] placed on your product, its capability to earn its place within the industry and deliver on functional promises.
Over the last few months, we have learnt more about the brand and our vision. We’ve learnt more about how important trust and access are to us as a brand and we’re expressing this with our brand new identity. We believe that great things can happen when digital businesses in Africa can reliably, ethically, and securely access their customers’ financial accounts.
Our drive to provide exceptionally easy access without compromising on trust and safety is the foundation of our identity. We have collaborated with the amazing Dá Design Studio to bring this new creative identity to life.
Here's what's new
New Logo, colour scheme, typeface, and illustration types.
Our new logo is an M structure made with 3-dimensional louvres. The louvres represent our commitment to helping digital businesses in Africa have better access to their customers’ financial accounts as well as our commitment to upholding the privacy, autonomy and security of internet users in Africa.
The Mono louvres are the backbone of our Visual Identity. Louvres can be opened to varying degrees and even closed, this represents how there’s so much access possible with Mono, yet we can trust that this access can be well managed for the safety, privacy and security of customers and businesses alike.
For our previous colour scheme, we had bright blue and white as our major colours and shades of yellow and green as complementary colours.
Our previous colour scheme was predominantly bright blue and white with shades of yellow and green as complementary colours. We kept the blue and expanded our palette to include black and white as our major colours, and we added a handful of bright colours that complement this monochrome look. The black, white and blue represent trust and stability, while the other vibrant colours indicate the diverse ways in which access can happen with Mono for the diverse businesses that collaborate with us.
Our new dominant typeface family is Duplicate Sans
This typeface combines bold lines with delicate curves, as a result, it signals stability and openness. Our bold illustrative style helps us say what we need to say in more descriptive and exciting ways.
The New Mono Website
We have built a new website that is reflective of the kind of brand that Mono has grown into.
The most important parts for us were improving on the user experience and doubling down on the simplicity of our products to both our partners (businesses and developers) and their customers.
Take a tour of the new website here.
What's next?
Consistency and improvement matter to us. For us, a brand is more than a few shiny design assets — it's the intangible sense of value people get when they interact with our business. Being consistent in creating value is what we will continue to build into the Mono brand from visual identity to the products we build.
