REBRAND ONMO
Research & Insight
To kick off the rebrand, I first prepared a creative brief to align everyone on the objectives and desired outcomes. Once the direction was clear, I began searching through my freelance network to find the right creative partner for the project. That's when I collaborated with Marcus Whittle, a talented freelance designer, to help shape the early creative direction and visual exploration.
Before putting pen to paper, we started by mapping the competitive landscape. Onmo was operating in an increasingly crowded UK fintech market, where visual language and tone play a crucial role in building trust and differentiate from other brands — especially for a credit product.
We analysed leading UK and US fintechs — including digital banks, credit card startups, and emerging lifestyle finance brands — to understand how they communicated value through colour, typography, motion, and tone of voice.
What we found was a clear pattern:
- Some brands were overly playful and friendly, but lacked credibility.
- Others appeared trustworthy, but felt static and uninspiring.
This revealed a strategic gap for Onmo to occupy:
A digital-first brand that feels trustworthy, transparent, and future-proof — blending the credibility of traditional finance with the energy and creativity of a tech startup.
These insights became the foundation of the next phase of the brand revamp — informing everything from colours and typography to use of illustrations and motion design.
Exploration
With the creative brief, moodboards, and research insights in hand, we began exploring how Onmo could visually express its new direction.
We developed four distinct visual territories, each representing a different strategic angle for the brand.
We started with initial concepts, keeping things deliberately simple to explore broad creative directions before getting into detail. At this stage, the focus was on ideas — not polish. We experimented with new visual elements like 3D objects and illustrations that could appear across key brand touchpoints such as the credit card, website, and marketing materials.
Rebranding can feel daunting, especially for a young company still finding its footing. This exercise helped everyone — from the CEO to investors — see and feel what the new Onmo could become, not just imagine it in theory.
It brought the creative vision to life and gave us the confidence to narrow down to one clear direction, which we then refined and developed into the final brand style.
Bringing the Brand to Life
Once we had a clear creative direction, we moved into visual refinement and real-world application. This phase was all about translating our chosen style into a flexible, digital-first identity that could scale across every touchpoint.
One of the main issues with the existing design was the lack of typographic and colour variety — there weren't enough font styles or colour combinations to create contrast and establish hierarchy across different sets of information.
To solve this, I selected two complementary typefaces — one for product UI and another for expressive marketing use.
And defined a new colour palette, carefully testing every combination for accessibility and contrast.
You can see the full spectrum of the styles in the Design System section.
Once I was confident in the new design foundations, we started developing our brand iconography and supportive 3D illustrations. We experimented with dozens of variations — exploring different objects, lighting setups, and material textures — to find a visual language that felt distinctively Onmo.
With the foundations in place, it was time to bring the brand to life and see how all the new elements — colours, type, and visuals — worked together across different formats.
We pulled everything together into a presentation deck to share with the company, investors, and our customers.
Internal Reception
The new direction was an instant hit across the company. Everyone was genuinely excited to see Onmo take shape in a way that finally felt relevant and unique.
People from every team — from customer support to compliance — started asking when they could use the new visuals in email signatures, letterheads, and internal decks.
It was one of those moments that make all the hard work worth it — seeing a brand come to life and truly belong to the people behind it.
Customer Survey
Next, I wanted to see how the new identity resonated with the people who mattered most — our customers.
We designed a survey showcasing the new direction and gathered feedback on how it made them feel - did it feel trustworthy? modern? confident?
I won't share the full survey here, but if you're curious about how it looked (and the insights we gathered), give me a shout — I'd love to walk you through it.
third-party validation
To remove internal bias and ensure the results were credible, we partnered with Taylor McKenzie, a third-party research agency, to conduct a large-scale A/B test across the UK with 5,000 participants.
The goal was to understand how well the new brand communicated trust, modernity, and relevance compared to the old one.
The findings were incredibly encouraging:
- The new direction received an overall score of 78/100 across a broad set of brand-perception questions.
- Only 16% of respondents said they preferred the old brand.
- The remaining majority overwhelmingly described the new Onmo as modern, trustworthy, and confident — the exact keywords I had defined in my original creative brief.
Seeing those words reflected back by real users was a powerful moment — it validated not only the creative direction but also the strategic thinking behind it.
That confidence set the tone for what came next: rolling out the new identity across all channels, starting with the website and the app.
Brand Guidelines
Once the new brand was validated, I compiled a comprehensive Brand Guidelines document to ensure consistency across every touchpoint. The 70-page guide covered everything from email signatures and presentation templates to tone of voice guidance, colour usage, typography, and visual principles for both marketing and internal tools. It became the single source of truth for anyone creating content at Onmo — helping teams stay aligned and confident in representing the brand correctly across all channels.
Please reach out if you'd like to see the full brand guidelines.
