RockawayX
Branding, UX design & development and social media design for tech VC
Services
Brand Design, Brand Guidelines, Information Architecture, Interactive Prototyping, Report Design, Social Media Design, User Experience Design, Wireframing.
Duration
3 monthsSite
rockawayx.com
Web3 VC RockawayX wanted to redesign their brand, website and socials to better connect with their target audience of tech founders and investors.
RockawayX is more than a traditional venture capital firm. Over the years, they’ve built a unique position in the Web3 and crypto ecosystem by running both venture strategies — backing early-stage crypto companies and projects — and credit strategies, providing essential lending to the same fast-moving sector.
RockawayX are hands-on and they wanted to reflect this proactive approach in the brand and website design, reflecting their tech credentials and solid engineering background and combining it with the investing and institutional aesthetic.
They chose Vector as their brand and UX design partner to create a brand that worked across their key touch points including social media and sales decks and a website experience that connected viscerally with their key target audiences.
Brand design
Balancing the 2 visual aesthetics of an engineering led VC and an investment house – leaning into the former but giving enough style of the latter – was the key challenge with the rebrand.
Working closely with the RockawayX team we created mood boards and style tiles to explore ideas.
We started with typefaces and colour – combining them in different ways to reflect the core disciplines of the company.
ABC Favorit is a strong typeface with subtle quirks that we felt had everything we needed to become both the logotype as well as headings and body copy across the website and other communications.
The team wanted the X to remain a strong visual element – something they could eventually use on its own. We customised the X as a nod to coding syntax, creating angle brackets turned sideways to further reflect the engineering heart of the company.
We chose a colour palette influenced by the bright colours of IDEs such as Visual Studio that could be used to highlight key messages and colour code sections of the site. We wanted to go 1 step further with the coding theme and selected a second typeface – Fira Code – for the sub headings that sit above main headings on the website.
UX design and build
RockawayX didn’t want to conform to the norms of marketing website design and were looking for something a little different to help them stand out. They also wanted to put their all important portfolio companies front and centre.
We came up with an opening homepage experience that offered a high impact beginning for the user, giving a large presence for the new brand and placing the companies in the most important place on the homepage – the top left corner usually reserved for the company logo.
We developed and incorporated key brand imagery – ASCII generated illustrations that animate on the homepage and across the website, giving the feel of typed code, to provide engagement to key pages across the website.
Social media design
Social channels such as LinkedIn and X are an important part of founder and investor outreach and RockawayX wanted their assets to carry through the brand as much as possible.
We designed a set of customisable templates in Figma as a shared and supported file that the team could use to create their post visuals and then tag us if they needed creative direction.
Sales deck design
One essential communications asset is the sales deck – brand and website are powerful communication tools but the sales deck plays a vital role in engaging key stakeholders and is arguably as important as the other two.
We were able to utilise the brand and website elements to great effect in the slides – leaning on the dark and light themes to give variety across the deck and dropping in the ASCII imagery at key moments.
Results
Since launch the feedback that RockawayX have received has been overwhelmingly positive – they set out to make an impact and feel they succeeded with Vector. Read the review here.
From the first sketches, we were impressed at how quickly Vector grasped our objectives and came up with truly original designs. We've received tons of praise for the new website. ”
