Brand Strategy & Identity: Wayfinder Ventures (Process Breakdown)

Wayfinder is a SF-based venture fund that backs some of the biggest names (Supabase, Flexport, Flexe, Nowports, Stoke Space, etc) in tech. Shortly after announcing their $35M seed-stage fund, we connected with the common goal to bring a refreshed messaging, identity, and visual system that ties into their core focus: helping startups.

Discovery & Strategy

Most of our rebrands can be put into 2 categories:

• Starting from scratch. Ground Zero. No brand, no voice, no identity
• Rebranding an already existing tone of voice, messaging and visual identity

With Wayfinder, while it was a rebrand revolving Wayfinder’s second fund, we felt the need to approach the brand from a blank state to set up a messaging that Wayfinder could build upon for years to come. I also wanted to have that freedom of starting from 0 and the ability to take any direction with this project. Unlike a SaaS enterprise project, the KPIs here were a bit more interesting: make something cool.

After some initial conversation, one thing was clear: Wayfinder was more than an investment vehicle, it was a partner.

Yuri himself was a founder. He built AeroFS, was backed by VCs, built a powerful team, scaled, and eventually exited. He’s been through the startup lifecycle and has real experience building products and solving problems. We really wanted that to be a highlight with this brand.

Below is an early version of a brand thesis we wrote…this went through a few changes and is shared again at the end.

Moodboards

One thing to note before jumping here is that moodboards are not just a way for the client to see what the brand will look like. In fact, most of the times in our projects, the moodboard visuals don’t reflect the brand concepts we build. For me, moodboards are a way to test out our narrative and see if we can apply it on real design. It’s alos kind of a vibe check to see if we’re on the same wavelength as our client.

Concept #1

This concept is the one that I felt the strongest about. Taking inspiration from geometry, patterns, and loops. This feels like “math art” at first glance and something that was in line with the vision of really connecting with the “developer” mindset. The complexity of the multi-coloured, geometrcic posters feels like a motherboard.

I was also inspired Play Studio’s brand for Open AI where they played with geometry at scale. That’s an idea I wanted to explore and convey: taking something really small and seemingly simple and then expanding it to the entire identity and every touchpoint. Like a bit.

Concept #2

This second concept was certainly the most toned down and safe option to explore. Usually concept #2 is the one that makes me really understand where the client is and how much experimentation do we really want in an identity. With this concept, typography is the identity. From the word scrambles on Smith&Diction’s Paradigm brand to the aschi art globe hoodie we see on the top, the typography is used as an illustrative and brand building element.

It pares really well with the otherwise simple and monotone identity.

Concept #3

This brand takes the vision board and strategy seriously and dives deep into what a “Wayfinder” really does: navigate and overcome. This direction takes inspiration from landscapes and nature with the goal to kind of show the various challenges faced by companies. It plays on the “founders’ journey” aesthetic, which is why I added references of maps, mazes, wayfinding icons, and blueprints.

I would have loved to see this moodboard shine a bit more, but knew it wasn’t going to make it very far since it does focus a little too much on the nature part of things which makes things a bit awkward for Wayfinder since it boxes them as a climate fund.

From here, instead of picking any one direction, we decided to move forward by incorporating what we liked about each moodboard and holistically developing the brand presentations.

Presentations

The goal of these initial presentations was to really just paint a core brand onto the canvas. Since this project, our process has evolved a bit (see Lyxos) and we try to make these first round presentations more detailed and polished.

Direction One

This first direction takes a lot of inspiration from the typographic illustration style and the nature-led palette. Below are some of the exact design pieces that were most influential while creating this.

This first direction really dives deep into the traditional VC vibe with a focus on using typography as illustrative elements. I also wanted to incorporate some of those cool landscape references into the brand, and through Gauche paintings could be a cool way to bring that in while ensuring consistency.

Direction Two

In direction two, we explore more of those “motherboard” style illustrative assets and find ways to pair it with a more expressive, tech brand.

We used a minimal Saans for typography which was paired by a rather expressive colour system, primarily inspired by the identities referenced in moodboard #1. Another big factor here was to use geometric shapes, line art (to convey maze + wayfinding), typography, and barcodes to make this expressive visual system that we could explore across the identity.

You can look at the third screen where the identity is in use on web screens, etc. I wanted to create a way for us to leverage the visual building blocks on illustrations, as well as UI and layout elements.

A wild idea

This wasn’t an official direction, but I had the idea to combine direction #1 and #2 and introduce a wild and expressive multi-media visual system for Wayfinder.

This uses some assets from our mood-board, but conveys the idea well: a gallery of illustrations, textures, blueprints, geometric loops, annotations, sketches, etc that all come together to form this one large system. The idea with this was to highlight the complexity of building of a startup, with hundreds of moving pieces and even more hundreds of iterations and revisions.

The client chose direction #1 with some notes on how to get us closer to the vision. We got a lot of solid feedback from this round and we did countless iterations to finally develop the brand we wanted.

Final Brand

To get to this place, we had to rethink a little bit about the vision and see what the 2 concept we presented lacked. Concept #1 felt shying away from tech; the colour system was too simple and did not feel innovative or techincal. The second colour system was too expressive, but not in the right way. It was closer to playful than complex. We wanted to blend the two together.

Colour System

The dark binder shades captures the essence of vintage academic binders, evoking a sense of timeless knowledge and research, while secondary colours bring an electric, contrasting energy to the brand, drawing inspiration from the dynamism of technology. This contrast is exactly what we were hoping to build

Typographic Illustration

The illustrations are built out of typographic nodes, all leading you in a myriad of complex paths. This was a subtle nod to the maze explorations from earlier and a reference to “Wayfinding”.

Ascii art

We further extended the identity by introducing and developing a series of Ascii art assets that brought the brand together. These pieces are often decorative and a simple brand knot that give life to any layout.

I think this illustration style development process could be a seperate blog where we can go over how we built this, and how we’ve prioritized the ability for our client to use + re-use this with minimal design effort.

Logomark

This was a big effort. A mark that could sum up Wayfinder without doing too much. The mark shows a cursor, 4 Ws, a maze, and a pixel all in one. It pairs really well with our typeface and is a great stand-alone illustrative mark as well.

Below are some of my fav explorations that did not make the cut:

This logo process breakdown could be another blog as well.

Website (Design and Development)

As a part of this branding project, we designed and developed a brand new fund website for Wayfinder, with a focus on featuring their portfolio companies and their stories. We built a CMS powered portfolio library, with each company having their own page.

Check out the live site at wayfinder.com

There were a lot more pieces that went into the execution of this identity, like preparing internal collateral, pitch decks, social media kits, etc. However, the goal of this document is to share the process and highlight the journey rather than the final product.

I had a lot of fun working on this project. Yuri was a great partner, and I’m glad we were able to work on this project. For a full case study + showcase, check out hex.inc/work/wayfinder.

That’s all for this breakdown. If you like this style of presentation or find it insightful, do let me know or like the post. Also, let me know if there’s anything I should focus more / less on. Getting better with each breakdown!

And, we’re booking more branding projects at HEX.