Current set out in 2015 with the mission to be the future of banking.

But to be the future, we needed to do more than just talk about it – we needed to act like it too.

Simpler, smarter, more modern.

Company Mission: Current was designed for the people left behind by a financial system that wasn’t built for them. To enable them to make the most of their money, and give them the products and opportunities to do even more with what they’ve got. It’s an ambitious goal, and we needed a brand that matched our mission.

Project Goal: Redesign the brand from the ground up. We stripped it back to the bolts, took a look at what we stood for and set out to find ways to embody our values in bigger and bolder expressions.

Project Scope: Redefine every element of the brand. Not just with what we look like, but how we talk, show up in the world, and even the products we continue to develop.

Personal Role: Lead writer — Brand Voice Development, UX Writing, Content Design, Copywriting, Storytelling

Our New Identity

Working with the design legends at COLLINS, we sharpened our logo, refined our color palette, simplified and streamlined our app, and introduced new design elements that embody the idea of the optimistic future we strive to help our members work towards.

We took a brand that felt a little outdated and young, and made it sharper and more sophisticated to better reflect both the people who use our app everyday, and the new members we’re looking to grow our product with.

Our New Voice

My main task on this project was defining a voice for the brand — crafting a persona, establishing some rules, and creating a Tone of Voice Bible from the ground up, something we’d never had as brand before.

Tone of Voice Bible (Sample)

Here are a few slides pulled from the Tone of Voice guidelines I put together that helped establish our persona, define our voice, create guardrails for how to apply our tone, and examples of what that voice starts to sound like. I then used this document to onboarding teams across departments from marketing, to product, to CS on our new tone and how it applied to their individual work.

(Not included — an extensive Do’s & Don’ts section with a now infamous slide just on exclamation points that has instilled a fear of my punctuation wrath in all my co-workers.)

Content Design

After our tone of voice was established, I set out to reevaluate every single piece of language across the brand, from our website, to the app, to every email, social media bio, and piece of SEO content, simplifying, refining, and humanizing the copy.

The Website

Goal: Craft a more narrative and human approach to introducing people to our brand.

Instead of just listing value props like so many of our competitors, we aimed to contextualize the benefits of our products within the real problems our members face every day.

The App

Goal: Introduce our new tone, inject humanity to add character and warmth, and bring much needed consistency.

The app was arguably one of the most important pieces of our redesign. More than just improving the way it looked, it was an opportunity to build trust with our users by refining and legitimizing the most direct touch point of our brand. With the copy we did so by focusing on adding a few key elements: humanity, tone, and consistency.

Before & After

Humanity:

Banking is cold and rigid, but we’re not really bank so we decided we shouldn’t talk like one. Our app was lacking an ownable voice and a warmth that indicated there were real people behind the app, so even in the smallest places we tried to add some humanity.

Consistency:

Certain aspects of our product lacked a consistent and clear language framework that got in the way of some features effectiveness. So as part of our copy overhaul we looked at our naming architecture and simplified things to create more consistent and descriptive naming conventions.

For example: “Overdrive” — the name of our overdraft protection feature — was obscure, and often inconsistently referred to across the app. Historically we would spend time and valuable real estate explaining what the feature even was to begin with. So we renamed it “Fee-free Overdraft” — simple, descriptive, consistent.

Head of Creative - Steve Peck | Senior Designer - Vincent Fileccia | Head of Production - Kristin McCarron | Design Agency — COLLINS | Web Motion & Illustration — BUCK