Visa

With 3.7 billion credentials in the world — both in digital form and physical such as cards — the Visa brand is recognizable to nearly everyone and has long stood for trust, security, acceptance and inclusion. Over the course of its 60+ year history, the company has maintained leadership by anticipating the future of commerce. Yet to most people, Visa has been synonymous with credit and debit cards, making it important to ensure it is seen as more than a credit card company and understood as a trusted network that empowers people and businesses to participate in the global economy.

Mucho, in collaboration with Visa, was tasked with creating a new brand identity system to change this paradigm — to re-position Visa as the network that enables the movement of a transaction from point A to point B, whether it’s person-to-person between friends, cross-border remittance payments for family members living abroad, or real-time payments for hourly workers in the gig economy.

Services

Brand Identity Motion Strategy Type Design

Industry

Corporate Services FinTech & Investment

The Strategy – Brand Blueprint

It was critical that the new Visa visual identity system represent the brand purpose and overall mission of the company at large. Visa did a significant amount of quantitative and qualitative research, including 200+ hours of conversation with key stakeholders in a range of markets.

These studies led to the creation of the Brand Blueprint, which lays the strategy and foundation for the Visa brand, culminating in its mission statement:

“We believe that economies that include everyone everywhere, uplift everyone everywhere.”

Design Principles
Building upon the brand strategy, Mucho developed six design principles to act as guardrails and reference points for everything that we would develop within this new brand identity. These new principles can guide internal teams and agencies around the world when rolling out the brand.

Brand Identity

One of the most important considerations when developing this new brand identity system was to create worldwide consistency of the brand, an holistic identity that would take Visa—a 60+ year old company and #8 on BrandZ’s most valuable brand list—and modernize its look for a digital-first world, while maintaining its incredible brand recognizability and equity.

Primary brand mark
The Visa brand mark is known worldwide as a mark of trust, security, and financial access. The design of the brand mark hasn’t changed, but we updated the color to capitalize on Visa’s heritage while telling a new story about the brand—evolved, brighter, and more dynamic. The intent was also to be more visible in the digital world and increasingly smaller mobile environments.

Supporting brand symbol
The Visa brand symbol speaks to the brand purpose. It represents Visa’s values and the belief that economies that include everyone everywhere, uplift everyone everywhere. The brand symbol reinforces Visa’s heritage and equity that Visa has built over the past 60+ years at point of sale.

A core part of the new identity was honoring the Visa visual heritage. The new brand symbol champions their values of access and equality, and brings the heart of the brand to the forefront. The symbol has always been there—we just dialed into the opportunity to use it in a creative way.

Rob Duncan Creative Director, Mucho

A Flexible System

The Visa brand mark and brand symbol work together to build equity in their visual heritage and elevate their brand purpose.

From the brand symbol, we derived a simple rule of thirds. The thirds-based grid system is designed to flex across any shape or size canvas, providing flexibility, while always anchoring the elements.

Mucho Visa Rebrand Illustration System Booklet

Color Palette

There is now a one-color system for everything Visa. The core colors are blue, white, and yellow, with a supporting secondary color palette that adds flexibility. The palette can be dialed up or down, working across various audience channels and initiatives. The brighter core colors reinvigorate and modernize the brand. A secondary palette creates optionality beyond blue and yellow, keeping the Visa brand at the core, while showing up in different and exciting ways for a range of audiences.

Typography

We commissioned Commercial Type to create a bespoke typeface for Visa across multiple languages. A sans serif, humanist typeface was created ‘Visa Dialect’. A ‘Humanist’ typeface was chosen for it’s legibility and human quality — Humanist typefaces, sometimes known as old-style or Venetian, are inspired by traditional Latin letterforms. Fonts in the humanist family are characterized by low contrast between thin and thick strokes, loose letter spacing, and wide counters, making them more legible for small-sized text.

Icon and Illlustration System

Using the brand symbol as the foundation, we extended the iconic color ratio into a unique icon and illustration system. The new system is consistent and cohesive. By creating a modular system in which icons and enriched icons can scale into illustrations, there’s potential to tell rich and engaging stories through illustration.

We wanted to evoke a sense of access and our belief in economic inclusion to underscore that Visa is so much more than a credit card company. The Mucho team understood the assignment and created a modern and dynamic visual brand identity that is engaging and visually compelling. We are immensely grateful for their vision and partnership.

Freddie Covington SVP, Chief Brand at Visa

Mucho Visa Rebrand Illustration System Art

Mucho Visa Rebrand Office Environment Neon

Mucho Visa Rebrand Office Environment Restroom Sign

Mucho Visa Rebrand Office Environment Illustration

Photography

In all Visa communication, we wanted to put their customers first. A new cutout style of portrait photography established for the initial Meet Visa campaign was built upon. We augmented this style with full bleed authentic and genuine photography — editorial-style images meant to offer deeper detail and insight into the stories and characters from the Visa ecosystem. We also use cut out style photography for commerce scenarios, reflecting the simplicity of new payment technologies and transactions.

Visa FB Small Business Owner 1 RGB 300dpi

Mucho Visa Rebrand Office Environment Elevator

Mucho Visa Rebrand P Enterprise Office 2 RGB 95dpi

Sponsorship

In sponsorship scenarios we can have more fun with the corporate typeface. In Sports environments for example, consumers are used to seeing fast paced graphic treatments and more creative, rather than corporate representations of the brand. We used Visa Dialect large and cropped—Integrating it with photography in a more dynamic way and playing with double entendres of messaging.