< Back

February 17th, 2024

The serious fun in creating useful things.

{ Design }

The serious fun in creating useful things.


As designers, we often have to find interesting ways to make work exciting— at the same time, make sure our bold, irrational ideas work within the bounds of business to find that perfect equilibrium.

Serious work gets rigid very quickly, so to keep things flexible, I approach every project as an opportunity to entertain and be entertained—with a childlike enthusiasm.

Making money useful for romantic couples— wealth that lasts forever.

Money Duo helps couples achieve tangible family goals.

Our research found that most couples who wanted to save together didn’t earn enough just to put excess money aside, so they set money aside for clear goals. They showed interest in investing toward tangible long-term goals and understood that building wealth together is a journey completed over time after striking off certain milestones along the way.

They also showed more interest in investing in goals functionally linked to their emotional commitment to their partners.

Product

To offer more value to couples, we crafted a product that not only helps couples store money together but also helps them plan & cross off tangible milestones.

Within each couple’s Duo, we introduced pods(containers) to help them intentionally invest toward tangible long-term milestones that put them on a true journey to building wealth. Depending on where you are as a couple, each pod contains milestones that couples need to hit to build wealth steadily over time.

Visual

Wealth that lasts forever.

To visually represent Money Duo, we played on the idea of love, ‘till death do us part’, and the idea that when you build wealth properly, it can last for generations.

Luckily for us, there were some established concepts:

  • A universal icon for love exists
  • A universal icon for forever already exists

Two is better than one.

Building wealth alone is cool but together, you’ll make dreams come true.

We represented this with the idea of twos.

Forever ~ Interlinked wedding rings which also resemble the infinity symbol.

Duo ~ 2 basic circles with each representing one partner. (The circles are rendered in simple geometry so they can scale across various media, especially at small sizes.)

The Duo webpage↗

How we build money.

Two sides, One coin.

In making money work for our customers, a lot if interesting things go on behind the curtains. For every new customer, for every investment created, for every top, for every money you earn… a team made that happen. One doesn’t work without the other.

We’ve decided to give professionals a peek into some of the exciting work we do in design, product and engineering.

Behind the screens.

To create a visual expression, we looked at how we worked— everybody uses a screen to get work done. So, we created our very own pixel universe— a visual style anchored on Sprite/Pixel graphics. Computers use pixels to generate colours that create detailed images.

For {Underthehood}, a monthly meet-up, we created a unique 2d representation of lifting the lid off to show you how it works. The curly brackets are a reference to how things operate within a system.

The blog↗