Background
The classical educational system for centuries has been widely successful in grooming people for specific roles. But it is often found lacking when it comes to providing financial literacy to students. This system has led to generations of people who are formally trained to live from paycheck to paycheck, while the idea of financial freedom remains a pipe dream.
The Money Code Academy is a platform designed for those who wish to break out of the cycle of debt and financial dependency by equipping them with the resources and knowledge needed to ultimately pave their way to financial freedom.
Insights
During the strategy session with the founder, it quickly became clear that a successful identity would have to communicate reliability, simplicity, and approachability. It also had to communicate the founder’s passion to unveil the possibility of financial freedom by identifying with an audience who mostly perceived financial freedom as a far-off dream with a winding road to achievement. But a major highlight of the strategy was to launch the flagship audio course titled: “Cracking the Money Code”.
The Approach
Usually, I would approach a project like this by creating a logo and then proceed to design the visual identity for the other brand touchpoints. But in this case, I started out by designing the Cover Art for the flagship course. This was because this product represented the core mission of the brand. And whatever insights I could glean from the design of the product, would greatly inform the rest of the design for the brand identity. It would help capture the “soul” of the brand as it were.
Inspiration for the cover art came through research I made into historical methods of encoding and decoding messages. Eventually, what jumped out to me was the Cypher Wheel. This also alluded to the idea of uncovering age-long financial principles that seem obscure. It’s hard to research this subject without giving a nod to the story of Alan Turing so beautifully depicted in The Imitation Game
Next came the challenge of visually communicating an ancient message in a modern way to depict the relevance of said secrets in world. I achieved this by incorporating identification elements and patterns that are common to modern-day currency notes.
I must cite a major source of inspiration to be Orhan Okay’s exploration of the Turkish Lira. Amongst other suggested options, the results of this approach easily turned out to be the most functional and successful.
