Uncommon Creative Studio has collaborated with Communion to create a new app designed to “arm the nation with a financial buffer against the world” and “fix its broken relationship with money”.

Founded this year, Communion was released against a backdrop of economic turbulence. Research carried out by the team behind the app found that 94% of 18–40 year olds have suffered from money anxiety and, for one in four of them, not a day goes by without worrying about money.

In light of this, Communion sought to provide the tools and insights needed to help users manage their finances efficiently and begin to save, using a combination of habit formation and behaviour change training. Operating under the unofficial tagline of ‘Saving is Freedom’, the team wanted this process to feel as “powerful and effortless” as spending.

To do so, it needed an identity that championed saving, making it seem attractive and feasible. Uncommon achieved this result through a bold approach that uses colour, texture, and symbolism to evoke feelings of strength and emancipation.

At the centre of the identity is Communion’s new logo, which depicts a chromatic letter ‘C’ as the broken link in a chain, alluding to the app’s ambition to help users break free of their financial restraints.

This chrome texture recurs throughout the identity, nodding to the materiality of the chain and “reflecting the world around us as well as acting as the buffer against it”. This finish has also been applied to a range of iconography, including twelve symbols ​​that reference the app’s “twelve founding principles”.

Elsewhere, the core colours of the brand help to ground it in the real world. ‘Sun’ yellow, ‘sky’ blue, ‘lawn’ green, and ‘rose’ pink appear frequently throughout, applied as background gradients that contrast with the radiance of the chrome.

The branding also incorporates an “abstracted version” of graph paper, nodding to the traditions of financial planning but rendering this using Communion’s forward-facing aesthetic.

“The big and bold approach to the Communion brand sets it apart in the world of finance, it’s not about safety and small type, it’s about being expressive and celebrating what freedom feels like,” explains the Uncommon team.

As part of the launch, Uncommon and Communion came up with the idea of the F.U.nd – which stands for ‘fuck you fund’, drawn from the term ‘fuck off fund’ popularised by writer Paulette Perhach. The idea is to celebrate “the cathartic joy of being able, finally, to tell that person – or thing – where to go”.

The launch film shows the image of a hand fixed to the bottom of the screen as it flips off everything around it – from “greedy effing landlords” to “crooked effing politics”, and even Made in Chelsea alumnus Spencer Matthews. The two fingers motif is a central one in Communion’s new branding, capturing its rebellious and optimistic spirit.

uncommon.london