After completing PAYNT’s final app prototype, I reiterated the UX design process to produce a responsive website. This timeline benefitted from my prior research and the existence of a style guide.

Given sparse imagery was a necessity to optimise this product’s functionality, I wanted to celebrate the brand’s iconography instead. To do this, I presented the key icons that users will require on the website login page as a low-opacity background pattern. By including less formal icons like the ‘piggy bank’, the design goal was to make the app feel less intimidating to financially unconfident users. Equally, this design was kept monochrome to avoid becoming ‘whacky’, potentially losing user trust.

The colour orange is widely associated with creativity, warmth, and energy. This is also true in branding — consider some of the world’s most creative companies that use orange as their main colour, e.g. Harley Davidson, Etsy, and SoundCloud.

Meanwhile, studies have found that many of us associate the colour blue with finance and banking apps — a trend corroborated by my competitor research.

One finding from my user research was that many of our target audience (creative freelancers) feel intimidated and / or demotivated by financial management software, leading to lots of people putting off essential tasks.

This is why I chose to use orange as the main brand colour: to go against trends, speak directly to creatives, and increase engagement. However, as blue is commonly seen as the most trustworthy colour and is complementary to orange, I included it in the product style guide as a tertiary colour.