Swipe Files - 📂 Branding breakdown for Sardine.ai

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Today's newsletter is written by my Conversion Factory cofounder, Zach Stevens.

He's the best designer I know and has deep experience with SaaS.

This is a transcript of a Branding Breakdown I did for Sardine.ai, a financial platform that wraps fraud detection, payments, and compliance all in one. Here is a video version if that suits your fancy.

A problem founders face when stealing a brand is drawing the line between going too far and not doing enough when merging their muse and their product.

That’s what makes Sardine’s rebrand in partnership with WhatElse Studio so effective.

For whatever reason, they chose to embody the humble sardine, which is fitting, given that there is safety in numbers and this platform consolidates multiple aspects of finance into one system (just a speculation so don’t quote me on it), creating an effective “school of fish.”

But that’s beside the point, what struck me about this brand is how much they were able to pull from this one, seemingly trivial, muse.

Specifically, there are three things I want to call out:

The Logo

It’s a fish, plain and simple, but it has enough stylization to it and uniqueness to make it identifiable in a logo landscape filled with pointless abstract marks and coin cliches.

The Wave Pattern

Also plain and simple, but clever in that the waves allude to the aquatic theme. Normally, I’d find an item like this to be trite, but since it’s placed in the context of a brand identity all about marine life, it’s thoughtful element with widespread application purposes.

Waves like this can be used as a unifying pattern across varied marketing collateral, videos, graphics, etc.

Holographic Photo Overlays

If you’ve ever seen a fish’s scales, they have a translucent, reflective quality to them, often appearing in a spectrum of light. So when I saw these color-coordinated specs of light adorning the photos of their team, I was impressed.

When stealing a brand, it’s easy to overlook small details within your muse. But if you dive deep enough, you can turn something as obvious as the light hitting a fish’s scales into a delightful design element.

What did you think?

—Corey

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