IQ Capital branding and website design

Background

The team at IQ Capital (IQC) approached me to reimagine their brand, update a pitch deck and carry the brand through to a new website.

The challenge

Really, the challenge here was to clearly convey what differentiates IQC from other venture capitalists. Their genuinely unique approach was pretty much lost in a lot of text and a fairly uninspiring and formal brand image. None of their personality and their friendly supportive nature was coming through either.

Here's the starting point:

The process

I spent many hours getting to know and understand the team, and buried my head in the world of venture capital to really see why their approach was different.

Firstly, I wanted to find some words and a tagline that succinctly captured their business and could act as starting point. After some back and forth, eventually we settled on:

"Connecting capital with expertise"

It has a dual meaning since it captures their differentiator (Investments in your company also include time and money from a seasoned angel investor) as well as hinting that they do it well - with expertise.

From there, I set about sketching some ideas for a logo, made some crude vectors in Adobe Illustrator, and started looking at a set of colours that could represent their brand.

I refined these down to a much smaller set and pitched them back to the company to see how close I was to the mark.

The Outcome 

After deciding against some slightly more textured and fussier looking designs, we eventually settled on a flat design with some bold colours.

The website is altogether much more friendly and the photos I took hopefully express the personalities and team behind the company more clearly.

Throughout, the website uses simple language and an open style, with a flat, single page design. The colour palette is kept consistent and the circular theme of the logo is echoed in the content sections.