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Bow Capital is a Silicon Valley based venture firm started by Vivek Ranadivé, the founder of TIBCO, the billion dollar company that digitized Wall Street, and the owner of the Sacramento Kings.
The fund is anchored by the University of California, started to help big ideas make it out of academia and grow in the real world.
They were coming out of stealth mode and needed to find a way to effectively define a brand with many moving parts, sharing their unique position with the world.
As project owners, we were responsible for building a strong strategy and a site to match.
So, we pulled in the right designers for the job, and got to work clarifying a strategy that would act as a North Star, guiding everything from copy to design, telling one cohesive story of legacy and innovation.
We revealed wide open spaces for them to differentiate their visual look and feel and verbal approach.
Others in the space played too much in the highly rational, black and white area.
So, having a full-color, stylized site, plus an emotive tagline would be an ownable direction.
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—Suraj Patel, Principal investor at Bow Capital
Bow had a lot going on: The University of California, TIBCO, and The Sacramento Kings. How do all of these seemingly disparate parts fit together?
We saw Bow take shape as a bridge between 3 different worlds: academia, technology, and entertainment. Between those three areas, an entrepreneur has connections to all the resources she needs to talk to the best scientific minds, build the product, scale it, and market it.
A bridge was a nice framework for conceptualizing what they were doing, but we could go deeper.
What is it about the University of California that makes it so special? Why do they have some of the most Nobel laureates of any institution in the world, and why have they remained at the top for over 150 years? How did Vivek reach the place he did? And why do basketball players have such pull on our society?
To make the brand come to life, how would we describe it if it were a person? How interesting and dynamic would it be?
In a world as competitive as venture capital, which receives a lot of slack for contributing to bro-culture, we wanted to make sure to build in some balance with masculine and feminine.
Bow had a lot going on: The University of California, TIBCO, and The Sacramento Kings. How do all of these seemingly disparate parts fit together?
We saw Bow take shape as a bridge between 3 different worlds: academia, technology, and entertainment. Between those three areas, an entrepreneur has connections to all the resources she needs to talk to the best scientific minds, build the product, scale it, and market it.
We took parts of their philosophy, which made up the backbone of their story, and tied in its verbal touch points throughout headlines all over the site, creating a cohesive story and beautiful site they’re happy with.
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