First Round Capital
INTRO
ROLE
Web Design
Web Development
API Integration
Client/Context
First Round Capital
Year
2015
Category
Venture Capital
Credits
The rebrand was led by Pentagram
From New Brand to New Website
A bold new…website
First Round Capital is a seed venture firm known for backing legendary companies like Uber, Square, Warby Parker (and HotelTonight). In 2015, they hired Pentagram to update their brand to a bold new style.
First Round partners enlisted me to help take concept designs using the new brand and implement them. My work included optimization and classic webmaster duties as well as web design and implementation to develop all pages on the website since the team at Pentagram primarily delivered high-level concepts and new identity artifacts so my work often included extrapolating new page designs to match the brand style all the way to deployment of site changes.
Building a Modern Web Magazine
The First Round Review is born
First Round didn't just see themselves as venture funding but a resource for start-ups. This borne the idea of the First Round Review called internally, "Harvard Business Review for startups." When the rebrand was launched, we also set out to build a custom-publishing platform in concert with (now-defunct) Marquee, a custom-blog start-up.
My role included article design and implementation as well as custom-code, API integration of Marquee's platform and back-end integration of Algolia as the embedded web search platform plus additional integration of social media APIs.
First Round Review continues to this day as a popular long-form magazine for startups and has been praised for its content and experience.
