Defining CoinTracker’s new brand and visual identity
Defining our brand
Since CoinTracker launched in 2017, there have been many defining moments in crypto. Bitcoin breaking $100k, the SEC approving spot ETFs, NFTs dominating the art market, just to name a few. But one thing that’s never been defined – until now – is CoinTracker’s brand.
So, why reimagine our brand now?
Over the past year, the team at CoinTracker has been hard at work designing new product experiences for our community, in addition to launching CoinTracker Enterprise.
To support this continued growth, CoinTracker's design team undertook a meaty challenge: redefine the brand and visual identity. The result is a tangible representation of our original mission and values, providing a foundation to build the next chapter of CoinTracker.
The updated design includes:
A logo and supportive wordmark that depict interlocking wallets and represents CoinTracker as the singular place to view — and make sense of — all your onchain activity
A color palette rooted in black and white, with complementary pops of color — a refreshing change from the deep blues and purples of crypto startups
An illustrative visual style that celebrates the future-forward nature of crypto and expresses it through unique geometric environments, soft textures, and vibrant colors
A technically robust design system that unifies our marketing and product pages for the first time, providing a seamless end-to-end experience for customers
A flexible new typeface, CoinTracker Pro, that’s both friendly and functional, able to convey everything from headline-worthy messaging to dense transactional details on our Enterprise product
A tone of voice that makes difficult and complicated topics easy to understand, approachable, and actionable
Designing for the future of crypto
The overall design intention was to simplify the experience (taxes are hard enough!) by reducing visual complexity, differentiating ourselves from our imitators, and avoiding worn-out tropes in crypto and fintech.
Together, we worked from the outside in, rebuilding the brand, design system, and UI to support new user experiences across all of our surfaces.
Finding our flow state
When users lean into our expertise, CoinTracker enables them to become super productive, filing their taxes with efficiency and ease. As a team, we had many discussions about how we wanted CoinTracker users to enter into a flow state while using it. Flow state might sound like a fuzzy proposition with a lot of woo – but actually it's a necessary state to enter for maximum efficiency.
"There's this focus that leads to a sense of... clarity. You know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other, you get immediate feedback… time disappears… you feel part of something larger."
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who coined "flow state"
This naturally led to our new positioning statement, crypto accounting in perfect flow. A flow state feels effortless, sharpens your focus, optimizes your productivity, and feels enjoyable. You may have heard famous musicians, coders, or chess masters talking about how flow state is necessary for them to do their deepest and best work.
Putting it all together
As a team we thought deeply about how our new brand and tone of voice would reach users across every touchpoint. The true end-to-end experience of a user begins on social media or word-of-mouth, and (hopefully) ends with them using your product and sharing about the experience.
Since our new brand launched, you'll see its impact on our landing pages, emails, daily portfolio tracking notices, the CoinTracker blog, and, of course, throughout the product. For the first time, we have a design system that spans product and marketing pages, giving us greater consistency and coherence end-to-end.
As our brand strategy articulated the need for CoinTracker to set itself apart from the sea of crypto and fintech startups, we landed on a visual style that was a departure from the line-heavy illustration styles that came to define startups in the mid-2010s. This led us to developing a colorful, textured and painterly illustration style with a lot of exciting possibilities – we've been build upon this visual vocabulary with hand-drawn, digital and Gen-AI tooling that embraces the hybridity of our current creative moment.
