PayPal has launched a new identity developed by Andrea Tracubbo-Campos’ team at Pentagram, who collaborated on the project with the brand’s in-house team.

Promising simplicity and flexibility in line with its products, PayPal’s new identity includes an adjusted ‘PP’ monogram that now comes with crisp edges, and a new upright wordmark featuring the brand’s new custom typeface, PayPal Pro, which has been adapted from Futura. The logo and wordmark no longer appear together in a lockup; it seems the wordmark is at the forefront of the identity while the logo is reserved for bitesized moments.

Colours have been subtly streamlined across the identity. The overlapping letters in the PayPal logo create a small Venn diagram that was previously dark blue and is now a medium shade of blue, echoing the brand colour of one of PayPal’s subsidiaries – the appropriately named Venmo.

The wider palette leans into black and white, with blue becoming an ‘accent’ rather than a prominent colour, a move that Pentagram hopes will distance it from other fintech brands.

This is a fair concern considering the parallels the identity shares with other such brands, which are arguably interchangeable with PayPal if you swapped the palettes for Klarna’s pink or Monzo’s coral. This isn’t the responsibility of any one brand or agency, but a sign of the challenges in achieving something ‘original’ in branding today.

Where the new identity has been criticised by some for losing its personality, it has also earned praise for the motion design, which brings life to the stripped-back branding. Animated assets and typography have been designed to evoke the movement of tapping or swiping when you pay, whether that’s via a physical card or on a smartphone.

The new identity is being rolled out across physical products such as debit cards, digital touchpoints, and its new PayPal Everywhere campaign by BBH starring Will Ferrell.

pentagram.com