Expensify
Rebuilding Expensify from the wordmark all the way down to the receipts.
About the project
We were thrilled to work closely with Expensify on a new identity system built to support a product used by millions of people around the world. When we began working together in 2022, Expensify had grown to more than 12 million members and had already processed more than 1.4 billion expense transactions.
Their software had been changing expense reporting since 2008, and a Super Bowl commercial in 2019 showed just how weird and expressive the Expensify universe could be. The rest of the experience needed to catch up.
We rebuilt the identity from the wordmark and iconmark through typography, color, illustration, motion, product UI, sound, and real-world applications, creating a system that could bring that same personality to every part of Expensify.
Since 2022, The Collected Works has continued as Expensify’s agency of record, helping evolve the brand across product, campaigns, events, partnerships, and everything in between.
Custom Type
Typography is one of the identity system’s most important pillars. Working closely with CoType and Newlyn, we created three customized type families: Expensify New Kansas, Expensify Neue, and Expensify Mono.
Creating custom type allowed us to fine-tune individual letterforms and the relationship between the families, giving Expensify a distinctly ownable set of tools that could move between the playful and utilitarian sides of the identity.
Color
Green is the hero color, infused across all aspects of the identity, with a broader palette designed for marketing, product, accessibility, and illustration, including an inclusive range of skin tonalities for human characters.
We also established primary color combinations and usage guidelines, allowing for plenty of flexibility while taking the second guessing out of creating new assets.
Illustration
After Expensify’s 2019 Super Bowl commercial opened a portal to an animated universe, they couldn’t stop thinking about what else might live there: a world where expense reports don’t suck and receipt scanning can happen in outer space.
Expensify teamed up again with Augenblick Studios, who created dozens of illustrations inspired by years of rumors, jokes, characters, and lore. We worked across teams to make sure this growing universe complemented the typography, color, and rest of the system as one cohesive whole.
Layout System
With all the main elements in place, we needed a system that could support the huge range of ways Expensify shows up without losing its playfulness.
The tools needed to work for hundreds of people across Expensify and its outside partners, making assets easy to create, adapt, and extend without us. The resulting framework stretches from product and social to trade shows, subway ads, billboards in Times Square, or, one day, Mars.
Product
Last, but definitely not least, the Expensify experience was redesigned to bring new levels of joy and practicality into the core product. Everything from color and typography down to the sound that plays when an expense report is sent was considered. We brought in our sonic partners at Antfood to help define the sonic identity system.
That system had to work across expenses, reports, receipts, cards, travel, invoices, bill pay, chat, workspaces, financial reporting, and more. With millions of people using Expensify across web and mobile, every element had to work together while keeping the experience genuinely useful.
Services
Client
Expensify