Melio

As an Interaction Designer & Illustrator at Melio, I lead the creation of our visual system across product and marketing- developing the brand mascot, illustrations, iconography, and core brand design guidelines.

My role blends systems thinking, interaction, and storytelling to shape a cohesive and flexible visual language used company-wide.

This is Mel

Mel is Melio’s brand mascot and a central figure in the illustration system. He is designed to be friendly and relatable, helping humanize the brand and create a connection with users.

Mel's main goal is helping users navigate the product with ease

and making complex processes feel simpler and friendlier

By creating a personal and deep connection between user and product, it helps convey complex information in a simplified way that identifies with the user, and can be used across various platforms

Visual Traits and Personality

Mel is a unique character- neither human nor animal and intentionally genderless. With a neutral expression and no mouth or eyebrows, Mel’s look is clean and neutral, which helps keep the character relatable yet serious.

It's appearance is consistent with a black outline and a white or transparent fill,

though other elements can appear in color when needed.

Design and Style

Mel’s appearance reflects the brand’s visual style- simple, modern, and delightful.

As it was developed as part of Melio’s rebranding process, we ensured it would harmonize with the company’s other new visual elements.

The design is versatile, enabling Mel to appear in different poses or situations,

creating a cohesive yet varied visual language.

Agent Mel

Instead of going with a generic AI look, we took a more human approach, bringing our brand mascot, Mel, into the experience to add personality and a sense of guidance. We translated Mel into a “squircle”, blending its features into an app-icon form, and paired it with a spark in our brand palette to bridge character and AI.

Using Rive and LottieFiles, Agent Mel becomes a living part of the UI, reacting across hover, loading, and empty states through motion and micro-interactions.

Not as decoration, but adding communication- making the system feel active, responsive, and intuitive, and helping the users feel they’re not alone.

Product kit

To support both Melio’s product experience and its partner ecosystem, we developed two complementary illustration kits built from the same visual foundations

Melio Kit

A set of illustrations featuring Mel- designed specifically for Melio’s core product.
This kit helps communicate product flows, explain complex concepts, and guide users with a consistent, friendly visual tone, all while maintaining the brand’s visual language.

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Partners Kit

A more generic, brand-agnostic illustration kit created for Melio’s external partners.
Built on a flexible color palette that allows each partner to apply their own brand colors, this system gives partners the freedom to align the visuals with their identity while still preserving a cohesive illustration style.