Together’s identity for data platform Spade digs beneath the surface — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

The US never adopted open banking, which has left banks and fintechs building products on top of fragmented, partial data. When you tap your card, the data shown is something like ‘SQ *COFFEESHP 855-123-4567,’ and the receiving system is expected to make sense of it. Spade’s real-time enrichment API turns that string into a verified merchant, location, category and timestamp. London-based agency Together took on the rebrand and website, working from a name that already carried the right metaphor and a product that lives up to it.

“The name was the starting point,” Creative Director Ben Wynn-Owen tells us. “A spade digs. It cuts through the surface, works through layers and reveals what’s underneath. That is precisely what Spade’s product does to a transaction.” Together’s task was to find a visual language that carried that idea without restating it, and to keep the work clear of the visual shorthand that often defines this category.

The illustration system is where the concept is clearest. Together built it from the everyday objects that appear in Spade’s merchant network: a Starbucks cup, gas pump nozzle, padlock or shopping bag. Each is rendered in dense topographic contour lines, the stacked layers feeling familiar from geological survey maps. The transfer of that visual language onto a coffee cup gives the object a sense of accumulated information.

The wordmark sits in restraint against that. Set in a custom-weighted sans serif chosen for precision and density, it sidesteps the obvious routes the name offers, like the playing card suit, a garden tool, or a shovel – and lets a focused typographic detail do the conceptual work. A trailing apostrophe after the ‘E,’ rendering the mark as SPADE’. “In writing, an apostrophe signals that something has been omitted, that there is more to the sentence than what you can see,” Wynn-Owen explains. “For Spade, that felt exactly right. Every transaction contains more than what appears on the surface.” The apostrophe extends beyond the logo to function as a depth mark across the wider system, signalling that the viewer is moving deeper into a piece of data or information. It gives the brand a small, ownable typographic cue connecting the product narrative back to a single mark.

The type system uses three families. NaN’s variable display sans SuperX Sans handles the headline work through its structured and precise character. Polar carries the body copy with clean legibility, and Polar Mono appears wherever code, API responses and raw data sit on the page, drawing a clear line between narrative content and functional output. Using a monospaced typeface in those moments signals fluency with the developer audience reading the page.

The colour palette is where Together moved furthest from the category’s conventions. Blues and purples dominate fintech to the point of becoming background noise, and Wynn-Owen frames the question as a positioning problem. “Using them would have made Spade instantly legible as a fintech company and instantly forgettable as a brand,” he tells us. The palette they landed on is rooted in the natural world – Forest as the primary dark, Lemongrass as the primary light accent, supported by Sage, Moss, Clay, Stone, Soil and Sand. The naming reinforces the throughline that runs through the contour-line illustrations and the apostrophe: layers, depth, and what lies beneath. Forest carries authority without the corporate coldness of navy, and Lemongrass cuts against it with an energy that feels technical and alive. The broader naturalistic family gives the system room to move from a high-contrast marketing moment to a quieter product or documentation context.

Across the wider system, the contour lines function as connective tissue. They appear in the illustration work and also stand alone as a graphic device, used for texture, depth and layered information. A more distinctive piece is the gauge, which visualises how far into a transaction Spade has gone and how many layers of data have been uncovered. It is a functional idea translated into a brand device, explaining the product at a glance.

Data visualisation is treated as a brand moment in its own right. Enriched transaction data – location, merchant name, category, timestamp and contact details – is laid out with precision around a central object, so that a Starbucks cup annotated with verified data points becomes a working demonstration of the product. The grid, iconography, photography direction and motion principles all follow the same thought, suggesting more information is available than what is immediately visible.

On the website, a mix of scroll-triggered reveals and ambient animation gives the visitor a sense of moving through layers as they read. Raw transaction strings resolve into structured records as the page progresses. By the point the explanatory copy arrives, the reader has already watched the product work. The contour-line objects, the data annotation frames and the gauge device were all built to work kinetically as well as graphically.

The discipline of the work shows up in what Together left out. Abstract network nodes, isometric dashboards, simplified 2D process icons, satisfied-customer photography, blues and purples used as default trust signals – none of it appears. “The problem with all of these is not that they are bad in isolation,” Wynn-Owen concludes. “It is that they have been repeated so many times that they have stopped communicating anything.”