Monday Pop

Overview

This project analyzed the Monday Docs user experience to understand its strengths and key pain points, directly informing the product's future development roadmap.

What I did

Type Design

Introduction

Forging a Bespoke Typeface at Monday.com

While working as a Product Designer at Monday.com, I identified an opportunity to improve our brand's quality and our design team's workflow. I initiated and led a personal project to create 'Monday Pop,' a new bespoke typeface to replace our existing font, Poppins. This project resulted in a valuable new asset that elevated our brand's visual polish and solved daily frustrations for our designers.

Thin

A Passion for Craft

My journey into design began at 16 with a fascination for typography. It wasn't something you could learn in school then, so I found the top type foundry in the country and called the founder, asking him to teach me. That experience taught me to see type as the smallest atom of design—a foundation built on the purity of shapes, negative space, and coherent systems. This perspective is the foundation I bring to all my design work.

Regular

Black

Problem

Whats Wrong with Poppins?

According to the research, people find Monday Docs lacking in several key areas, as presented below. These shortcomings negatively impact the user experience, creating frustration and potential churn.

Unbalanced Shapes

At large sizes, the characters had awkward shapes and unbalanced curves, which made brand and marketing work feel unpolished.

Poor Kerning

The font lacked proper kerning, forcing designers to waste time manually adjusting spacing in titles and headlines.

Awkward Line Spacing

The font's ascenders and descenders were mismatched, which required designers to use unnecessarily large line spacing to prevent letters from colliding.

Inconsistent Feel

Some letters in heavier weights, like the lowercase 'e', had disproportionately thin parts, making them feel weak and disconnected from the rest of the typeface.

Thin・Extralight・Light・Regular・Medium・SemiBold・Bold・ExtraBold・Black

Regular

Black

Bold

approach

Evolution, Not Revolution

My goal was to enhance the brand's typography, not disrupt it. A radical change would have created inconsistencies with years of existing designs, so the strategy was one of careful evolution.

To ensure a smooth transition for the design team, I decided to build upon the open-source foundation of Poppins. This allowed me to legally modify and improve the font without creating something jarringly new or running into copyright issues.

The design philosophy for the new typeface, which I named "Monday Pop," was to be geometric, yet friendly. I focused on creating a font that felt modern, stable, and professional while retaining the approachable and energetic personality of the Monday.com brand. A critical goal was to improve its performance and legibility, especially at the smaller sizes common in user interfaces.