Mercado Pago is an online wallet, created and used for payments on the Latin American marketplace Mercado Livre. Today it is the largest and the most trusted online payment system in Mexico.
Mercado Pago was created as the service responsible for the payment part of Mercado Livre, but by today has grown into a self-sufficient online payment system, allowing other sites and services to use it as a payment gateway.
The platform covers all kinds of online-wallet services, such as recharging cell phones, sending money to the platform through payment of boletos, and withdrawing the balance to the bank account. The platform adds more and more services, which makes it closer to a mobile bank than a simple wallet.
In July 2022 Mercado Pago officially became a digital bank, and today also offers card machine service to individuals and businesses. Upon completing a sale, the balance becomes available in the Mercado Pago account and the user can transfer their balance to their bank account.
What is Mercado Pago?
Mercado Pago is the name of an online payment system, established by a large Latin American company Mercado Livre. The platform was founded in 1999, and by today has grown into the largest online marketplace in its region.
In terms of visual identity, the digital bank follows the corporate style, and repeats the badge of the Mercado Livre marketplace, using just a different color palette, based on fresh and cold shades, which evoke a sense of trustworthiness and security.
The Mercado Pago service was launched in 2004, and its first logo was introduced in the same year. It was a simple yet confident badge, composed of a two-leveled inscription, underlined by a stylized orbit in two shades of blue with a small green sphere set on its left part. The lettering in a slanted sans-serif font was executed in the same shades of blue, as the orbit, with the “Mercado” in a lighter shade, and “Pago” in the dark one.
The redesign of 2007 has introduced a more serious and professional version of the Mercado Pago badge. This time the straight and stable title case lettering in a narrowed and the bold and-serif font was accompanied by an emblem on the left. The emblem featured a gradient blue square with a voluminous gradient globe on it. The bold white “MP” monogram was placed in the bottom right corner of the icon.
For social distance support during the pandemic in 2020, the company has temporarily changed its emblem, replacing the handshake with the image of two hands touching elbows. All other elements, including the color palette and the typeface, remained unchanged. The mother company of the service, Mercado Livre, has also been using the same badge, but in yellow and blue.
The logo, created for the service in 2013, is still used by Mercado Pago, and is fully based on the badge of Mercado Livre, but is executed in a different color palette. The badge is composed of a horizontally-oriented oval in solid blue with a dark outline and an image of two white hands shaking. The emblem is accompanied by a two-leveled lowercase inscription in two shades of blue.
The bold and modern lowercase lettering from the primary Mercado Pago badge is set in a fancy sans-serif typeface with rounded contours and straight cuts of the characters’ lines. The closest fonts to the one, used in this insignia, are, probably, Toroka Bold or Coolvetica Regular, but with the contours of the letters softened and modernized.
As for the color palette of the Mercado Pago visual identity, it is based on two shades of blue and white, a combination, which stands for reliability, professionalism, confidence, and trustworthiness.