This fintech identity was inspired by YouTube videos of slicing Spam

Simplicity is sometimes an underrated currency in design. Particularly when you’re branding a company like Tranch, a UK fintech business peddling the concept of payment ease. To visualise the detangling of finances, Brisbane-based Lovework Studio landed on an animated solution for Tranch’s new identity. Essentially, the studio looked to the tradition of looping animations – in particular, ASMR-inducing clips from YouTube – to illustrate Tranch’s USP: turning large payments into bite-sized chunks.

As for those YouTube inspirations, Lovework co-founder Campbell Butler recounts happening across “wonderful clips of cheese and spam being satisfyingly sliced”, knowing straight away they needed to be replicated for Tranch (previously UpCash). While the animations by Richard Coldicott: “were an absolute necessity!” according to Campbell, they actually came after the studio developed a set of in-house illustrations with Lucinda Clark. Depicting all kinds of items – from pie charts and iphones to bread – being slowly sliced into pieces, the illustrations were inspired by typographic legend Takenobu Igarashi. Meaning the project unites the worlds of food videos and axonometric alphabets too.

The idea of chopping things into chunks crops up again for the logo, which shows a block payment being cut into four tranches, and rearranged into a ‘T’. The logo tranches also become layout devices across the work, expanding to fit messages that detail more about Tranch’s services. Each tranch connects to the central logo shape, affectionately coined “the butter knife” by Lovework. Meanwhile, the studio opted for BW Gradual for type owing to its curved cuts and slices, a feature that “slotted in perfectly” with the overarching Tranch concept.

While the Tranch identity feels smooth and simple, it’s also refreshingly out there for the fintech field. “B2B products and services are typically blue, grey and stiff,” says Campbell. “We wanted the identity to be bright, recognisable and fun.” However, Lovework remained: “careful to strike a balance to ensure that the brand was colourful and friendly but also confident and trustworthy.” The studio landed on the final product after posing a few iterations to Tranch, including a 3D version of the identity also illustrating payments being cut into blocks. While the more abstract idea was rejected for looking “a bit close to the blockchain world”, it’s fascinating to see how the interim work fed into a final 2D outcome.