Together’s identity for data platform Spade digs beneath the surface

The Brand Identity: 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.

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The rebranding of a fintech platform like Spade is significant for the industry, offering fresh insights into visual identity strategies that are particularly relevant for brand strategy professionals.