One of the hottest financial services companies in the industry, Morningstar has carved out a strong brand identity for itself by emphasizing design in the creation of its database products. Attractive and intelligently designed, the Morningstar "page" is often asked for by name and lauded for providing useful information on mutual funds to individual investors.

Back in 1984, a 27-year-old financial analyst in Chicago named Joe Mansueto anticipated that aging baby boomers, fretting over the possibility of a bankrupt Social Security system, would seek shelter in the stock market. "Mutual funds were beginning to grow strongly, but it was an underserved market," Mansueto recalls. "People needed reliable information to make more intelligent decisions. Problem was, a lot of information on mutual funds was available to institutional investors, but nothing for the general public."

Sensing an untapped opportunity, Mansueto decided to take institutional-quality information and bring it down to a mass level to the people who were really buying mutual funds. Camping out in his one- bedroom apartment, he started a quarterly publication called "The Mutual Fund Sourcebook" and began building a mutual funds database.

This year that business, which Mansueto named Morningstar, expects to report $40 million in revenue.

Customers have been drawn to the quality and attributes much of that success to the effective use of design. "Creating products that are intelligently designed, attractive and display information in a helpful context is a core part of our business," he says. "Morningstar, at its heart, is an information company, so part of the design problem is how to display all this information in a way that is logical and helps the user extract greater value from it. We wrestle with many, many design issues here. Part of my job is to say that design is important and to get people focusing on it and to recruit wonderful talent to concentrate on these issues."

His determination began with a telephone call to the legendary designer Paul Rand in 1989. "After the company was five years old and we were on a firmer footing, I thought it was time to improve our design standards," recalls Mansueto. "I looked at our old logo and knew we had to start there. It seemed difficult to institute a high-quality design program without a proper logo."

Mansueto had read Rand's "A Designer's Art," and became a fan of the landmark logos that Rand had created for IBM, Cummins, UPS, ABC, NeXT, among others. He tracked the 75-year-old Rand down at his Weston, Connecticut home, and pursued him with letters and phone calls, finally flying to Connecticut to meet with him in person. After hearing Mansueto's request, Rand replied, "I'll work on it and let you know when I'm done." Four months later, Rand sent Mansueto the finished piece. Although Rand's design fee was $50,000, a significant sum for a company then ringing up sales of $1-2 million, Mansueto calls the logo "one of our most valuable assets. Paul Rand. That's where our design program began."

Concerned that "some hack" would devalue the effectiveness of his logo, Rand, an avowed curmudgeon who died in 1997, introduced Mansueto to Philip Burton, telling him that with Phil he'd be in good hands. Burton, who Rand had taught with at Yale, had studied in the Swiss school of typography. Thanks to that background, Burton is the kind of designer who enjoys puzzling out the nuances of complex information problems. Morningstar had a vexing one: the redesign of the company's core product, "the page" a dense, constantly updated sheet of data, graphs, charts and analysis for a given mutual fund. Burton, an associate professor of graphic design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, agreed to work with Morningstar as a design consultant, which he continues to do.

"When I first saw the page, I said, `This is a catastrophe,'" recalls Burton. "You can't have a page with type in all caps, with different point sizes, with different weights. Information design is not the kind of thing people find flashy. It's dealing with lots of data. The job is to make things clear."

In tackling the project, Burton needed a like-minded associate on staff at Morningstar. He introduced Mansueto to David Williams, a designer for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago who had been a student of his at Yale. Williams was hired as the company's design director.

"We started out saying, `There's a tremendous truckload of stuff on this page,'" Williams remembers. "We had to look at what groups of data existed. What should sit next to one another. How type drives layers of information. How layers of information drive the problem."

But unlike other more visually driven designers, Williams and Burton found they had to collaborate closely with the Morningstar editors who developed the content of the page.

"Much of our design understanding of the information comes from discussion with our editors about the meaning of relationships between data," Williams says. "If editors and designers are doing their job, this information is displayed in a way that is intuitive and easy to understand. There is a logic to its sequence that, hopefully, the user understands."

The designers stripped away existing heavy black rules that gave the information a caged, cramped look. They wanted the consistency of a single typeface and set out to find one with all the weights and styles necessary. The font also had to possess a good, clear set of numerals. Serif numbers weren't right for this kind of data, Burton and Williams agreed. They didn't want to mix up a sans serif face with serif numbers either. They finally selected Univers, a typeface "that embodies a lot of integrity because in the 1957 original, designer Adrian Frutiger created 21 versions of the type," Burton says.

"The amount of data influences point size," he explains. "I tried to use as large a type size as I could without squeezing the type onto the page. You need to have enough air and weight on the page to read. Rules, and how you use them, are dictated by the nature of the information. Serif versus sans serif type, rag versus justified columns? You use what's best to resolve the problem. The only one absolute is you have to know the problem inside out."

Eventually, the typographic handling of the data has come to define Morningstar's corporate image. In addition, the company has incorporated user friendly details like a star-rating system and pictograms.

"David [Williams] and his design team were thoroughly involved in our web site's development from the initial development meetings. It made a huge difference," Mansueto says. "Design has made a large contribution in terms of how our site is structured, how the information is grouped and the navigational scheme. We'd like to extend this type of design involvement more throughout the company."

"The absolute need is to know the content, not to just design in an aesthetically pleasing way," Williams concurs.

That effective packaging of content and visuals has helped make Morningstar one of the hottest companies in the financial services industry. "The brand that has emerged as dominant in the 1990s is not Fidelity, Putnam or even Merrill Lynch but instead is Morningstar," states a recent Bernstein Research report. "Equity funds rated with four or five stars by Morningstar have received 80-100% of all net (mutual fund cash) inflows the brand name that truly influences behavior is Morningstar."

Such praise is a handsome payout on the gamble Mansueto made when he first established design as a high priority at the fledgling company.

"In our industry, with the kind of look we are fostering, there was always the risk we might be perceived as looking flip and immature by deviating from the typically institutional way of doing things," he acknowledges. "But I think there's a certain cachet to that. I like the aura it's like that of a young Silicon Valley company. Design has allowed us to stand out; to look different and show that difference boldly. That fresh look reflects our fresh way of doing business, whether it's design or our approach to methodology.

"I've always liked companies like Starbucks, Nike and Esprit, which developed a strong sense of design," he adds. "It makes them special in the way they represent themselves to the world, and it has paid off, whether through personal user satisfaction or in bottom-line results. Design has been a huge part of our success. It's given us our distinctive edge over the competition."