In my role at Klarna for the past 7 years I’ve had the pleasure to lead and execute several in-house identity- and design projects. Below are a few examples.
Klarna is one of europes most valuable fintech companies.
Klarna is one of europes most valuable fintech companies.
KLARNA BRAND STUDIO
2015–2022
2015–2022
Responsibility: Head of Brand design and competence owner. Coaching team, hiring designers, onboarding agencies, identifying needs and creating briefs, educating marketers, collaborating with creatives, product marketers and product designers aswell as external creatives.
I’ve been both stakeholder, design director or hands-on art director and designer.
KLARNA / BRAND IDENTITY
Design evolution
Since a successful rebrand in 2017, I’ve led two bigger design evolutions in-house. One in 2019 and one i 2021. Even though Klarnas valuation raised tremendously, learnigs showed that our sender ID could be stronger especially in new and competative markets such as the US.
We simplified our core color palette and recuced all background noise for a clearer message. We introduced pink as a common denominator in all communcation assets to increse brand recognition.
We introduced new playful shapes and and a more energetic color palette, both in marketing and in the app. We added the pink badge recognised from checkout on marketing assets for quicker sender recall.
During these years a lot of work was put into defining correct usage of our brand assets through extensive guidelines to enable scaling. Curious to see them? Part of it can be found on brand.klarna.com.
2022 / Illustration style
Klarna needed an updated illustration style that was as unique and distinct as our visual world and can carry the brand ID in touchpoints where imagery isn’t appropriate.
The illustrations and Klarna’s new app iconography is tightly connected through the color palette and gradient treatment.
The in-house team worked together with Hugmun to explore and define a unique and clear treatment for the illustrations and the animation style was developed by Animade.
2021 / Motion
I evolved and refined Klarna’s visual identity by building the foundation of a motion team and created a brief for them to develop a concept that adds consistency and recognition across platforms and formats through movement and can be scalable for adaptations.
The digital world has become a part of pop culture; swipe left for next, browse for more content and tap to go deeper/activate. We can unify the way we move across screens by being inspired by this movement language, fostering a modern motion identity.
Klarna’s motion is inspired by technology and familiar movements. It’s pillars evolve around upward, onward and focus. The project delivery consists of concept, guidelines and templates.
Motion lead: Christian Carlsson, Studio Motiv (ex Klarna)
2019 / Typography
In collaboration with Klarna’s design system team and Colophon Foundry we created ‘Klarna Text’, an evergreen solution that would be more technologically sound and perform across multiple platforms.
Raised ascenders, a generous x-height, and geometry-retention in forms like the ‘C’, ‘G’, and ‘O’ all enable coherence between the existing type (utilised for headlines) and the new (used at all other scales). Aware of the heavy typographic lifting expected the realms of finance and analytics, numerical data was sure to play an important part in the overall role of the type; numbers, therefore, were drawn to reflect a discreet playfulness that manages to maintain delight amidst mathematical tedium.
In 2021 we also created ‘Klarna Display’. It’s an headline version in the family of Klarna Text, but with distinct branded playful moments, that we can use as a work-horse in product and heavy lifting titles.
