Switch Commerce

The challenge

Switch Commerce processes ATM transactions. Independent deployers and sales organizations — the companies that actually own and run the machines you use — route their transactions through Switch, and manage their whole portfolio through Switch’s terminal management platform on the web and on a phone. It’s infrastructure work: unglamorous, exacting, and judged entirely on whether it stays up. They’ve been doing it out of Texas since 2003.

Which is exactly what makes the brand problem hard. You cannot photograph a transaction. There is no hero shot of five-nines uptime, no product demo that makes a settlement file exciting. When the thing you sell is reliability, the brand has to carry the entire argument — and it has to do it in a room full of competitors making the identical claim.

The second problem was one every company that grows for two decades ends up with. The brand hadn’t been designed so much as accumulated. A logo from one era, a brochure from another, booth graphics a show vendor threw together, slide decks each department built for itself. No single piece of it was a disaster. But nobody had ever decided any of it, and the pile added up to something that read as a capable vendor when the company had, in fact, become one of the leaders in its category.

That gap — between what the company had become and what its materials said it was — is the whole reason we were brought in. Closing it once would have been a project. Keeping it closed for ten years is the actual story.

The approach

A rebrand, starting from what was already true

A rebrand fails when it’s an aesthetic imposed from outside. So we didn’t start with mood boards. We started inside the company: how their people talk about the work, what their clients actually call them about, and what separates them from the processor down the road. The answers were consistent — the technology is genuinely ahead, and there’s a real person at the end of the phone at three in the morning. Advanced and human, at the same time. Most companies in payments only manage to look like one or the other.

The identity was built to hold both. A mark with the precision the technology deserves, a palette and type system with enough warmth that the company doesn’t read as a faceless switch in a data center, and a full set of lockups and variants so the mark works on a business card, an app icon, a hoodie, and a twenty-by-twenty booth wall without being redrawn each time. Then the whole back catalog got brought forward — every asset still in circulation reissued in the new system, so there was no six-month stretch where half the company’s materials contradicted the other half.

The website

The site is where a prospect goes after the trade show conversation, and where a competitor’s customer goes when they’ve finally had enough. It has to do two contradictory jobs: reassure a buyer who understands the category in detail, and stay legible to the ones still figuring out what they need. We designed it around that split — the story up front in plain terms, the depth available for anyone who wants it, and a clear next step from every page instead of a contact form parked at the end of the site.

Words that don’t hide behind the vocabulary

Payments has a dialect, and it’s a comfortable place to hide. Interchange, terminal driving, EMV, IADs, ISOs, settlement windows — string enough of it together and you can fill a page without ever saying what you do for the person reading it. We wrote the content the other way: name the problem the reader has, say plainly how Switch handles it, and use the industry term when the industry term is the clearest word available rather than as a substitute for having a point.

The expertise was never ours. It sits with their team, and the good lines usually came out of a conversation with someone who’d been doing this for fifteen years. Our job was to hear which sentence was the real one and cut everything standing in front of it.

Platform and mobile app design consulting

We don’t write their platform — their engineers do, and they’re good at it. Where we come in is the part that decides whether all that engineering feels like a tool or feels like a chore: what a screen is actually for, what belongs on it, what gets cut, and what a user reaches for first.

Terminal management is a genuinely hard design problem. A single customer might be watching a few thousand ATMs across several states — cash levels, faults, uptime, transaction volume, alerts firing at all hours. The temptation is to expose everything, because everything is technically useful. The right answer is a hierarchy: what a portfolio owner needs at a glance on a Monday morning, and what a technician standing in a gas station parking lot at two in the morning needs on a phone, in the cold, with one hand. Those are different screens. We help them stay different.

The trade show floor

Trade shows are where this industry does business, and a booth is the least forgiving brand test there is. It has to read from thirty feet down a crowded aisle and hold up from three feet while someone leans against the counter for twenty minutes. Get it wrong and you’ve paid for floor space to look smaller than you are.

We handle the whole thing: designing the booth, building the graphics, producing the structure, and getting it delivered to the show so their team walks into a stand that’s ready. Around it goes everything the floor consumes — the handouts, the giveaways, the badges, the signage. Show after show, year after year, they arrive looking like the company they are.

Print, because this business still runs on it

Plenty of industries have gone fully digital. This one hasn’t, and pretending otherwise costs deals. Brochures get carried out of booths. Booklets get left behind after a meeting. One-sheets get pulled out mid-conversation when a prospect asks about a specific service. Business cards still get handed across tables.

We design and produce all of it, held to the same standard as the screen work — because a beautiful website undone by a brochure that looks like a different company is a story the prospect notices even if they never say it out loud.

A design system, so the standard survives us

This is the piece that makes the rest durable. Every brand drifts, and it never drifts because of a big decision. It drifts because someone needed a slide by Thursday and eyeballed the blue, because a vendor didn’t have the right logo file, because a new hire made a flyer with the best of intentions.

So we built them a system: the marks and their approved variants, the palette with real values rather than approximations, the type scale, the layout rules, the imagery treatment, and templates for the things their team produces internally between projects. It answers the everyday questions without a phone call, and it holds the line on the days we’re not in the room. A brand that only stays consistent when the designers are watching isn’t a brand. It’s a rented look.

Ten years of showing up

The rebrand was the beginning. What’s kept it alive is the ordinary, unromantic work of the decade since: a new service line that needs its own materials, next year’s show, a refreshed one-sheet, a screen someone’s unsure about, a card for a new hire, an acquisition to fold into the system. They send one message and it gets handled by people who already know the brand, already know the business, and don’t need to be re-briefed on either.

That’s the difference between a vendor and a partner, and it’s a difference you can only demonstrate by sticking around.

The outcome

Switch Commerce presents the way a market leader should. The identity is settled and used correctly, the website carries the story, the words sound like the people who actually do the work, and the booth, the brochures, and the platform all came from the same hand. A prospect who meets them at a show, reads a one-sheet on the plane home, and opens the site that night gets one consistent company — which, in a category where the whole pitch is reliability, is itself part of the argument.

The design system is what makes that repeatable rather than lucky. It carries the standard between projects, so consistency isn’t a thing anyone has to remember to enforce.

And underneath all of it is the part that’s harder to put in a portfolio. The materials don’t just look sharp — they say something true about how the company sees itself and how it wants to be seen: technically ahead, genuinely human, and worth trusting with something that cannot go down. Ten years in, that’s still the brief, and it still shapes every piece we make with them.