Before there was a product, there was a vision. We built the brand to carry it.

Cadana

Services

Identity Design

Visual Design

Date

23.06.21

Cadana set out to modernize payroll infrastructure across Africa, automating wage disbursement for businesses and paying employees through the channels they actually use, bank transfer, mobile money, cash pickup. But the real audience wasn't the businesses signing the contract. It was a young, digitally fluent workforce who'd write off anything that looked like a bank. The brand had to earn trust without looking like it was asking for it.

Visit company

Challenges

Cadana's founders had a specific ask, a brand vibrant enough that young employees would see it as theirs, not something imposed on them by their employer — while still carrying enough weight that businesses would trust it with their payroll. Those two goals pull in different directions, and reconciling them across two founders' distinct visions was the real work of the brief.

Outcome

We designed toward the employee first. The palette and mark needed to feel current and personal, something a young employee would be glad to see land in their notifications while staying structured enough to hold up on an invoice or a compliance document. Getting both into one coherent system, rather than compromising toward the middle, was what made the identity work. The system extended across social, print, and campaign materials, and we stayed on to maintain it as the company scaled helping the identity evolve without losing what made it recognizable in the first place. Cadana went on to raise over $1.5M in seed funding with this brand as part of that story.

View work