Together’s identity for data platform Spade digs beneath the surface

The US never adopted open banking, which has left banks and fintechs building products on top of fragmented, partial data. When you tap your card, the data shown is something like ‘SQ *COFFEESHP 855-123-4567,’ and the receiving system is expected to make sense of it. Spade’s real-time enrichment API turns that string into a verified merchant, location, category and timestamp. London-based agency Together took on the rebrand and website, working from a name that already carried the right metaphor and a product that lives up to it. “The name was the starting point,” Creative Director Ben Wynn-Owen tells us. “A spade digs. It cuts through the surface, works through layers and reveals what’s underneath. That is precisely what Spade’s product does to a transaction.” Together’s task was to find a visual language that carried that idea without restating it, and to keep the work clear of the visual shorthand that often defines this category. The illustration system is where the concept is clearest. Together built it from the everyday objects that appear in Spade’s merchant network: a Starbucks cup, gas pump nozzle, padlock or shopping bag. Each is rendered in dense topographic contour lines, the stacked layers feeling familiar from geological survey maps. The transfer of that visual language onto a coffee cup gives the object a sense of accumulated information.