We started by looking at the current banking landscape in India. By and large, they were still focussed on traditional ideas such as saving for the sake of saving, and not for your goals. 

Outside India, we looked at players and learnt that they were all about challenging the status quo—and giving consumers a better option.

Eventually, we realised that the consumers to whom our product would appeal the most were digital natives and young adults (24 – 34)—people who felt intimidated by traditional banks.

The insight was that Indian consumers were not necessarily unhappy with their banks. We needed to create tension and build a brand that would fit into this young consumer’s life.

Banking that keeps pace with you.

To bring the positioning to life, we associated Jupiter as a wingperson, someone who stays by your side and nudges you along through this new journey of banking.

For our Tone of Voice, we wanted to be approachable, energetic and humour-friendly. One of the main guidelines was to talk like the user, and minimise complex banking jargon. Inspired by the name, we leaned into space as a theme and built #LifeAtJupiter

Our logo wordmark features a strong contrasted Sans Serif typeface that cues a feeling of trust. The ‘J’ is in upper case to signify the idea of making the most of your money. It also is in a distinct form which makes the word mark memorable—symbolic of a hook, one that is always with you.

The illustration is a simple vector style that cues friendliness and communicates the message clearly. Additionally, we created a library of graphic forms using the J for icons and the debit card design to build the story further. 

The primary colours are Spacefire, inspired by the planet’s red spot, and Intergalactic Green to contrast it.

For the launch, we created a Parcel from Space, a kit that featured the Spacefire debit card along with merchandise. The idea was that this kit came straight from Jupiter, and held all the key tools a user would need to kickstart their banking journey including a comic featuring the know-hows.

As Falcon deals with money, the identity had to cue trust and expertise, while at the same time, being contemporary and bold. To achieve this we tapped into the mindset of growth often found with new businesses. 

We locked in “Built To Build With” as our tagline, which symbolised collaboration and expertise but also established Falcon as the building blocks for their clients to build upon. 

The “F” shaped logo was inspired by the form of the falcon bird with emphasis on its beak. 

Shades of blue, white and black were selected to bring in trust and expertise while maintaining a confident personality. A fluid mesh gradient cued the dynamism of the brand and plays a vital role across communication.

The iconography and illustration style are a combination of 3D and geometric shapes. By layering colours and shapes we brought in the idea of Falcon’s highly customisable stack.

With Falcon set to disrupt the industry, our challenge was to create a website that is equally innovative and future-forward. As the website is the brand’s primary digital touchpoint, this could only come to life using the latest technology, WebFlow. 

Expanding on our tagline, “Built To Build With”, we created isometric blocks to represent our core offering and convey key USPs. With a wide range of offerings comes an equally extensive set of icons made with geometrical shapes and sharp corners.     

Heroing the movement and interaction played an important role to build intrigue. The visual assets transformed as one navigated through the website, reflecting key information with every scroll. We then added a layer of micro-interactions and animations to make the experience more engaging. 

This resulted in a responsive website that was disruptive for an audience eager to take on the future of fintech.       

With IIFL’s rapid expansion, we noticed that all the subsidiaries had grown in isolation, lacked consistency in brand language, and required an overall brand architecture.

There was also a gap between the services offered and the positioning that IIFL Wealth was communicating to its clients. The brand had premium offerings, and multiple subsidiaries providing more than just wealth advisory services, however, these offerings were not branded or communicated clearly.

Our goal was to give IIFL Wealth a strong brand positioning and identity that communicated its values and proposition to external clients as well as internal stakeholders.

We also decided to design a brand architecture for all its subsidiaries. One that gave them a distinct brand language and voice of their own, but still stemmed from the same roots as the parent brand.

Another element we analysed was the name of the brand. Since it was offering more than just ‘wealth management’, we needed to give it a name that encompassed all the financial services the brand offered.

We began by analysing all the services IIFL Wealth offered in order to come up with a name that encompassed them all. Since the services ranged from Wealth Finance and Trustee Services to Asset Management, we settled on the name ‘IIFL Wealth & Asset Management’.

We also designed a logo for this brand that would then be adapted into the brand architecture for each subsidiary. We used a deeper blue to bring out the strength and sophistication of the brand while using a more contemporary typeface that emphasised progressiveness and confidence.

We then moved on to the visual and verbal language for the brand. With regard to the typography, we chose sleek, elegant and contemporary typefaces to make the brand more modern, sophisticated and approachable. We also used shades of blue, orange, yellow and grey to evoke a sense of positivity, authority and practicality within clients.

Since IIFL Wealth & Asset Management was here to make wealth management easier for their clients, we ensured our verbal language was smart and professional, while still remaining inspiring and emphatic. This made the brand knowledgeable and experts in their field, but not one that is overwhelming to the consumer.

As the brand’s positioning and core beliefs were not clearly defined, we dove into IIFL’s brand wheel to analyse its ethos and brand values. Defining these was key for us to start establishing the new positioning for the brand. After carefully analysing what the brand stood for, we arrived at six core values: Transparency, Adaptability, Progressiveness, Expertise, Invested, Demystification.

These values now had to be clearly communicated both internally and externally.

We therefore created The Capital Code. This brand brochure not only listed out the values and vision of the company for internal stakeholders, but was also instrumental in standardising the sales pitch made by IIFL’s sales team. It could be given to clients after meetings for further reference, thereby clearly communicating the values and proposition of the company to each stakeholder.

The new brand was launched with email communications from senior management to the entire company, along with a letter from business partners explaining how the company had grown and why the change was necessary.

Branded stationery and other collaterals were left at employees’ desks, the walls were painted with the new brand colours and premium looking logos adorned the organisation. We also designed new office posters, standees and banners to create more of a buzz. This generated a lot of excitement about the rebranding and ushered in a new and prosperous phase at the company.

After analysing several venture capitalist firms’ websites, we had two major takeaways – the information was cluttered, and the communication lacked a personal touch.

We immediately realised that our website layout would have to stand out. To accomplish this, we decided to use muted colours such as beige, black, white and light blue, all so that our communication remained bold and easy to read.

Highlighting Lightbox’s expertise and experience was crucial to build credibility. To make this stand out, we kept Lightbox’s ‘Portfolio’ page as uncluttered as possible. Each client had a short right up and further information could be accessed by clicking on the thumbnails.

Blogs regarding recent trends, business models and information about the market were also a vital way for Lightbox to convey their expertise. We soon realised however, that visitors on websites prefer not to scroll through text with no end in sight. We therefore added ‘the average reading time’ to each blog so that viewers had an idea of the length of the article before opening it.

Once the layout and functionality of the website took shape, we had to make the communication more personal and the team more approachable. We decided to include a ‘Team’ page that allowed viewers to read detailed write-ups about each member of the Lightbox family from their work experience to their personal ambitions. We also let viewers contact the team on their work email IDs.

This shifted Lightbox from your average VC firm to an approachable and experienced group of individuals who were interested in helping entrepreneurs grow their businesses. To truly drive this home, we included a ‘Pitch us’ page where entrepreneurs could easily tell the Lightbox team about their venture and then take the investment process further.

Five years and over $100 million later, Lightbox stands as a unique VC firm not solely interested in maximising profits, but in closely collaborating with entrepreneurs to build successful businesses.

The only thing Indian millennials love more than their smartphones, is shopping on their smartphones. They just can’t seem to get enough of it! And like everywhere else in the world, they want what they want and they want it now! The millions of transactions that happen in India on smartphones every day prove just how much they love getting what they want, when they want. But there were two problems with this situation:

1. Millennials tend to live from salary to salary, which means they don’t always have the money to SPEND NOW on the things they WANT NOW.

2. They’re so busy on their smartphones they don’t really have any time or money to spare doing the things they love.

Enter PayU India, one of India’s largest payment gateways, to the rescue of the millennials. They wanted to give them a solution that gave these millennials free money (for 2 weeks) in the fastest way possible, so they could get on with the other stuff they wanted to do.

Our Challenge was to build a brand that would stand out visually on any merchant check out screen, and also become a catchphrase for faster online payments. The clients coined the name LAZYPAY; a blend of the words ‘Later’, ‘Easy’, ‘Payments’, our job was to build a brand around it, and we had 32 x 32 pixels of icon space to do that in.

Our solution started with the tagline ‘buying you time’ because that’s exactly what the brand was doing; letting you buy what you want now and pay for it later.

Next, we created a responsive, visual identity for the brand using the Fast Forward icon. This was a mnemonic to emphasize just how much time you were saving by using LazyPay to skip the extra steps and check out in less than 5 seconds.

This identity was then extended onto our checkout screens. In order to get customers out of the checkout process in less than 5 seconds, we broke down the steps to include only the bare necessities, bringing it down to a two-step process only.

But it doesn’t just stop there! Our identity was later extended onto their website and email communications to explain the product and its benefits, and remind customers to pay back what they owed.

By the end of it all, we even had a campaign that talked about how LazyPay was your Fast Forward button for all the things you wanted.

And that ladies and gentleman, is how we succeeded in creating a bold and vibrant brand language that had the energy and spunk of our target audience: the millennials.

LazyPay currently has 500 thousand downloads on the Google Play Store, with an estimated 1.5 checkout processes a week. If you do the math, we’ve saved people approximately 835 hours a month and counting…

Please See// giving you more time to do the things you love.

Cin Cin, prounounced Chin Chin,
is an Italian restaurant and bar that wanted to give Indians a taste of an authentic Italian experience.