FinTech
M-Wek
M-Wek's mission is to show the world the sheer power of properly considered recruitment. Operating primarily in the finance and tech sectors, M-Wek treat everyone with respect and never act like a recruitment robot. They're also driving change within their industry by actively working to address the gender and diversity imbalance within these sectors.
Services
Brand + Marketing Strategy, Identity + Brand Design, Web Design, Copywriting, Illustration + Animation.
THE CHALLENGE
- M-Wek’s brand identity was outdated and confused. There was no consistency or consideration of aesthetics, messaging and application – which is crucial to build trust and loyalty.
- M-Wek wanted to attract more FinTech clients/candidates without alienating their Financial clients. Yet their visual and digital presence didn’t align with the expectations of a FinTech demographic. Simply put, M-Wek weren’t speaking their language.
- The old M-Wek website didn’t tell the M-Wek story, accurately portray the brand’s personality or act as a convincer.
BAREFACED SOLUTION
- We built a cohesive brand system for M-Wek, promoting them as a dependable and trustworthy. As a result, M-Wek are experiencing considerably heightened brand recognition, brand recall and interest in their services.
- We created a brand identity that manages to posses the established aesthetic of the historic finance industry, whilst drawing inspiration from tech giant re-brands and trends. This allows M-Wek to appeal simultaneously to their very specific cross-section of clients and candidates. The result is esteemed, approachable but modern.
- Before starting work on their identity, we oversaw an intensive immersion session to ensure our team truly understood who M-Wek are. Our aim is to work from inside out to create something truly authentic for each of our clients. Working closely with the founder and his team, we helped the M-Wek team better establish their core values and beliefs. This led to us developing a brand tone-of-voice and a concrete set of USPs. M-Wek are now able to more confidently communicate with their audience, garnering increased respect and affinity for their brand.
“Barefaced took the time not just to understand our brief, but to understand us. As such, the final result was basically, perfect. The feedback we have had on our website has been outstanding. They even made me change my logo which I would NEVER have thought of doing. It really worked.”
– Mark Weclawek, Founder
50% of our placements were female in 2019
BRAND STRATEGY
We referenced serif fonts from Broadsheet newspapers, such as the Financial Times, to create a feeling of familiarity and trustworthiness among M-Wek’s business savvy audience. We leaned into this further with the colour palette – taking yet more inspiration from the Financial Times and it’s famous pink pages. By updating the pink to a warmer more modern hue, we created a calming and nurturing colour that fits nicely with M-Wek’s human approach to recruitment. Affable, charming and conversational, this peach is a looker.
To underpin the colour palette with a dose of seriousness, we added a deep blue which is known to evoke feelings of reliability, trust and dependability. Deep blue is the go-to for many banks, financial institutions and social media giants for this very reason. We went one step further by adding a rich teal, a unique blend of blue’s stability and green’s optimism. Finally, a light warm grey acts as the neutral shade, whilst benefiting the palette further with its futuristic, stable and dignified connotations.
The primary logo features a tightly kerned hyphen to appear more ‘solid’. It’s accompanied by a rotationally symmetrical monogram, which gives the brand an air of refinement and tradition. It’s counter part, the Circle brand mark, draws from financial graphs, pie charts and every PowerPoint in the history of office meetings. Each ring in the circle acts as a percentage bar for key M-Wek statistics, revealing data on the issues close to M-Wek’s hearts, such as the number of female identifying candidates they placed in a year. The idea here is to redraw the logo regularly to reveal a progression in their accomplishments. This allows M-Wek to provide a public record of their success and growth in a visually compelling and modern way. Furthermore, it cements M-Wek’s commitment to their core values and key objectives, positioning them as relationship focused brand that looks at the whole person, not just the profile.
Brilliant branding is something that needs to be flexible and the introduction of colour gradients is way to efficiently achieve this. Colour gradients allow us to customise the M-Wek design language in a way that lends itself to emerging trends in marketing personalisation. Design and tech savvy audiences will appreciate and recognise the gradients as a marker of modernity, whilst the colour palette ensures that no one audience feels alienated.
DIGITAL STRATEGY
Gradients provide a strong backdrop to M-Wek’s new website. Sitting as an animated canvas, they form the foundation on which everything else is based upon. The peach acts as a guide, directing and encouraging users around the website, indicating what to click and highlighting calls-to-action. Delivered in a collection of pages that take more inspiration from broadsheets, these column based layouts are rich with typographical details, animated charts and M-Wek’s core values.
The brand tone of voice has been established to act more like a knowledgeable friend instead of faceless office entity. The copy, written in partnership with M-Wek, blends professional insight with informal turn of phrase. Optimistic, straightforward and with a little dose of wit, we aimed to create a verbal identity for M-Wek that is both polished and approachable.
