The next step is to create a brand of my own, focusing on motion and communication between product and user.
The first step is to create a name. Looking at my competitor analysis I really like Robinhood’s approach to this. Robinhood of course being a folk story about an outlaw who steals from the rich to give to the poor. This is a great, I want to say almost satirical take on what it means to invest but it feels very ambitious and righteous in its approach and in what it communicates to its users. They of course drew on this to build the rest of their brand identity, adopting a green brand colour for all of their assets and a little leaf logo as worn by Robin Hood himself.
Another brokerage, E Toro, do something similar, basing their identity on a bull. Bulls represent a upwind market within the investing world and bears indicate a down turn. This is also a good way to create an identity.
For myself when I think of what I want the brand to advocate it’s how important patience is with this kind of thing. In thinking about patience I tried, much like Robinhood, to think of stories all about patience and consistency. This landed me on the well known story of the tortoise and the hare. Which I think tells the story of investing perfectly.
The hare is day trading, reactive, impulsive, convinced that speed and aggression wins. The tortoise is long term investing, consistent, unhurried, unbothered by noise. The story's whole point is that the hare should **win by every obvious measure, but doesn't. That's exactly what the data says about investing too.
With this I came up with the name Torrin. I took the Tor from tortoise and combined it with investing to create Torrin. I think this is a solid name, it is an area I don’t want to spend to much time on as I want to place priority on motion moving forward.
For type, I wanted to revisit a font I used last semester, Etrusco Now. It's one I really enjoyed working with but never had the opportunity to incorporate into a digital product, so I was eager to change that here. It feels sleek and considered, and I think it suits the tone of this project well.
For the secondary typeface, used for body copy and smaller UI elements, I chose Inter. It's a deliberate choice to keep things simple, when users are trying to understand their investments, the typography should get out of the way.
Much like Robinhood I want to draw on my namesake to help flesh out the brand. For colour I think the concept of the tortoise is a great place to draw on. The idea of a “Shell Green” sounds great in my mind but doesn't exactly signify a specific green. This made me think of how i could use various greens, maybe even all at once. With this I landed on using a mix of many greens, creating a gradient for my brands colour identity.
A gradient also felt appropriate from a motion perspective. Gradients have an inherent sense of movement and transition built into them, which feels conceptually aligned with a product that is all about progress over time. There's also something intentional about avoiding a single flat brand colour. Markets move, portfolios shift, and a colour identity that does the same feels more honest to the product than something static.
