Youtopia

The brief:

An established chartered accountant wanted to launch an online premium accounts service with a focus on helping individuals achieve their life goals, rather than the standard cold hard accounting services. With such a different approach to personal accounting, they needed some suitably approachable, modern, and individual branding for the service. All they had was a name: “Youtopia”.

The solution:

The dictionary definition of ‘utopia’ is “an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect.”

How to represent unachievable perfection in icon form?

Rather than focus on a place or state, the new branding was developed around a collection of mathematically ‘perfect’ shapes. These shapes represent the idea of perfection in their own symmetry and mathematically balanced construction, which also represents the mathematical nature of the business, with their intermingled relationship representing all individual products coming together to create one holistic service.

The resulting ‘emblem’ of Youtopia is a collection of uniform shapes coming together to create many other shapes and patterns – all depending on how the viewer sees it: representing the idea that every persons idea of perfection is different… which in turn represents the personal life goals focus of the business.

Bright colours were employed in the branding to give a punchy upbeat tone, with each colour chosen for its positive, and relevant, emotional properties. ‘YOU’ is bolder to highlight that the service is all about the individual, with the font tweaked slightly to make the ‘O’s full circles to mirror the symmetrical ‘perfection’ of the icon. The black text gives stark contrast to the multi colour icon, drawing the viewers eye initially to the ‘changing’ pattern.

A bespoke dictionary style definition was then developed as a tag line.