Refreshing the Venmo brand and .com
Venmo engaged with ueno to tackle a brand update by refreshing their design system and implementing it across a number of touchpoints. It was a year-long engagement with multiple streams of work.
I was part of the core creative team that worked on designing and delivering a new Venmo.com experience. We worked on a new sitemap, content strategy, content outlines, wireframes, an identity refresh, 20+ page designs, content creation, and finally, worked with a team of developers to build and launch the site.
Time for a change
While the Venmo app is a much loved product (with well over 40 million active users), Venmo’s brand and marketing touchpoints were long overdue for an overhaul. Their website and brand presence felt dated and inconsistent, failing to reflect the rich user experiences that their products enabled.
Additionally, the Venmo team had an ambitious roadmap to release new products, and they needed a brand identity system that could support this bigger story.
Revisiting the Venmo brand
We started off with exploring the next evolution of the Venmo brand. The Venmo team came with a few foundational elements that were strong enough to keep (typefaces, colors, illustrations), and we explored an expanded system that would better suite Venmo’s growing needs.
Team
Creative Director: Grayden Poper
Producer: Josh Deitel
Designers: Myself, Keene Neimack, Dave Toro, Hrvoje Grubisic
Designing a new Venmo.com
Once a direction for the design system had been chosen, our team worked to expand it across a number of webpages. We worked with our copywriters and the Venmo team to tell the right story for each of these pages.
We defined unique ways to showcase the many different products within Venmo’s ecosystem, such as payment notes, physical debit and credit cards, in-app moments, user experiences, and more.
Team
Creative Director: Grayden Poper
Producer: Aneisa Hagen
Copywriters: Jim Larkin, Ari Thompson
Designers: Myself, Dac Davy
Photoshoot for original content
Ueno’s content team facilitated a series of photoshoots to capture images for use on Venmo.com.
Team
Producer: Mo Twine
Art Director: Keene Neimack
Photographer: Troy Stains
Photographer: James Rice
Developing Venmo.com
We worked closely with a dev team from Matter Supply to build the website, providing specific documentation, assets, and motion guidance on how elements should behave upon load and interaction.
Team
Creative Director: Grayden Poper
Producer: Aneisa Hagen
Designers: Myself, Dac Davy, Jay Mantri
Developers: Matter Supply
A new style guide for Venmo
Near the end of our engagement, I was responsible for creating a comprehensive style guide to hand off to the Venmo marketing and design team. (It was a total of 190 pages!)
We provided detailed usage guidance around the different elements that make up the design system, such as illustration, photography, product representation and much more.
Credits
Working with Venmo was a year-long engagement with 10+ different workstreams (only a few briefly described above), and very much took a village to deliver. Special thanks to my ueno team below.
Strategists:
Carrie Ko, Lexi Perez
Copywriters:
Jim Larkin, Ari Thompson
Producers:
Christina Milan, Josh Deitel, Elliot Sanchez, Aneisa Hagen, Mo Twine
Creative Director:
Grayden Poper
Designers:
Dac Davy, Keene Neimack, Dave Toro, Jay Mantri, Hrvoje Grubisic
Photography Team:
Troy Stains, James Rice
Developers:
Matter Supply
Managing Director:
Gillian Rhode
Big Boss:
Halli Thorleifsson
Illustrator:
Sebastian Curi
And thanks to Kelly Rice and Angela Primavera from the Venmo team for being great clients and collaborators!
