TQ Ventures
Crafting a playful, retro brand identity for a bespoke VC firm.
Founded by legendary partners Andrew Marks, Scooter Braun, and Schuster Tanger — TQ Ventures is a leading venture capital firm, investing in brands you know and love like Clubhouse, Ro, Liquid IV, June Homes, and dozens of others.
The partners approached us with a unique request: design and build a brand identity and website centered around one of the best parts of their childhoods — playing video games with their friends.
Their existing website was too simple + didn't nail the look and feel that the brand had quickly evolved into, so they were looking for a fresh set of eyes to bring the brand forward and reflect their core values. But on top of that, their website needed to be dirt simple to edit. Their team is rapidly deploying capital into founders/start-ups and their website needed to be able to keep up, without relying on expensive engineering resources or an agency retainer.
Through our research + discovery phases with their team, we knew that the core values they wanted to convey through the design were to feel approachable, whimsical, and unique. As soon as they suggested video games as a core theme of the design, we knew the path forward to create a site that was playful, easy to digest, and stood out from the myriad of VC firm websites out there.
After our initial calls + getting their favorite sites, we started our moodboarding process to help narrow down the look-and-feel the partners were going for — showcasing a few different looks.
While unique and less whimsical, this direction is mostly approachable. It's characterized by open space, unique art direction, a simple layout with interesting interactions, and a defined color palette and typeface. This simple yet interesting approach lends itself to highlighting the value prop, making it front and center.
After our initial calls + getting their favorite sites, we started our moodboarding process to help narrow down the look-and-feel the partners were going for — showcasing a few different looks.
After gathering their feedback, we experimented with a variety of concepts — what if we turned the website into a video game, with an interactive preloader that allowed users to customize their experience, pick a video game, and play it on the website? What if each team member was illustrated in a retro video game character style? What if the site had "cheat codes" to unlock special features?
Through many collaborative sessions with their team to align on style, we collectively decided on a simple but tasteful look-and-feel — one that presented the brand with the retro styles they desired but also simplified the final design and layout to keep the focus of the site on the brands they're investing in.
For the build, choosing Webflow as the platform of choice was a no-brainer. Knowing that they wanted to be able to edit the website quickly and easily and bring to the design to life with animations made Webflow the perfect candidate for the build.
Our team got to work — bringing all the design assets into Webflow and setting up our class nomenclature so that the site is easy to maintain and grow, both for our team and for TQ's team as well. Beyond that, we created Lottie files from scratch in Adobe After Effects and imported those into Webflow for the interactions, leveraging the two to get lightweight interaction files that don't slow down page speed while also getting access to Webflow's native controls to adjust the animations visually.
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