Project
Recibo
Identity
Editorial design
2025
The brief
Recibo is an accounting app for Portugal’s freelancers: designers, translators, tradespeople and drivers who issue their own receipts and file their own taxes. It has 38,000 paying customers and a support team of nine in Porto who spend every April answering the same questions. Its brand was a calculator icon in app-store blue. Recibo wanted something customers would recognise on paper as well as on screen, and a printed magazine to send before each tax season, starting in January 2025.
The idea
A freelancer’s year is a pile of receipts, so the identity is cut from one: the torn zigzag edge of a till roll, on every card, folder and envelope. The colours are receipt white, the violet of a rubber stamp and a highlighter yellow for the one number that matters. The magazine arrives twice a year, its issue number huge on the cover, and every quarter gets a folder with its number on it, Q1 to Q4, for the receipts that still come on paper.
Cards
Highlighter yellow with the wordmark in stamp violet and a torn bottom edge. The support team hands them out at co-working spaces; the receipt spike was their idea.
The magazine
Forty pages, twice a year: what changed in the rules, three freelancers’ real numbers and a page of deadlines to cut out. It arrives in January and July, a few weeks before each deadline.
Receipt folders
One folder per quarter, Q1 to Q4, sent with the January issue, so paper receipts have somewhere to go before they’re photographed into the app.
Post
Envelopes in receipt white with a torn yellow band, for the magazine, the folders and the letters nobody likes getting.
What changed
The first magazine went out in January 2025 with the four folders, and April’s support queue was the shortest in the company’s history. The folders now turn up in customers’ photos of their desks, usually the Q4 one, fullest of all.
Credits
Okapi: Beatriz Correia (lead designer), João Antunes (magazine), Marta Lobo (editor)
Recibo: Sara Mendes (CEO), Nuno Rocha (head of support)
With: printed in Porto; photography by Rafael Costa
