Started in 2011, Qapital is Swedish start-up that provides an online service to manage and get an overview of users' personal finances. It's not a bank nor a financial advise company, it simply connects to your existing bank accounts and generates charts and summaries of how, where, and when you spent your money. And it does it in a very pretty way. This month, Qapital has released its private Beta site and along with it a new identity designed by Stockholm-based Bedow.
Similar to yesterday's OzHarvest project— but on the other of the end of profit spectrum — this is a textbook case of a start-up with a one-hundred-percent start-up-ey logo that needed an actual, usable, trustworthy identity to make it a viable option for people to trust and share their bank account information with. The old logo was overly friendly and the magnifying glass "Q" and creepy, lizard-like eye peeking out of it made it feel more like an auditing service looking at the minutia of your finances. The new one starts off with a pie chart in the "Q" — a more appropriate and clear reference for a service that charts your finances — and from there it just builds on geometric forms to complete the rest of the characters. The one thing that bothers me is the white, diagonal strip in the "Q" which I understand was added to make the "Q" more readable but I think it would have still worked without it and avoid it looking like the vector shapes didn't "snap" in Illustrator. Overall, I really like the simplicity of it but wonder if it's too playful once again. To answer my own question: it straddles a fine line but the online presence, simple and elegant, tips it in its favor.
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