The Making of the Rough Draft Ventures Site

After a whirlwind week of preparation and hard work from our dedicated student team, partners at General Catalyst, and professional advisors, Rough Draft Ventures officially launched on December 12th. It was amazing to see the outpouring of support we received from the Boston community and beyond, and we're more than excited to make our first investment soon.

For me personally, the launch was an opportunity to develop a professional website for Rough Draft. I was trusted with the full design vision, something that's both incredibly exciting and nerve-wracking.

I had a week to build the site. And finish 2 problem sets, build a robot, and write a paper. Cool.

Inspiration

After several meetings with the General Catalyst team and the small initial Rough Draft team, we knew we could go in two directions: a simple one or two color site (we had The Penthouse Project and Piccsy as inspiration) or a website featuring large, full-width photos and bold typography (inspiration was Whiteboard.is and Fear the Grizzly).

We decided on the latter option so we could prominently feature students working on startups and pictures of the beautiful colleges in the Boston area.

In the end, we even wanted the photos to be short videos with very subtle movement: the Black Negative website was our inspiration.

Wireframing and Sketching

Here are a few pages that capture the wireframing process behind the site. As you can see, the navigation placement changed (from top to left-hand nav) and I ditched the idea of using monochrome icons that matched the logo (they ended up looking too busy).

Changing the Vision

Before building the site, I needed to determine whether having 3-4 autoplaying 5-second videos on one page was even feasible.

It wasn't.

Not only would people need to wait for ~20 megabytes of data to be delivered to their browser, the page wouldn't scroll smoothly and mobile display was a pain. So with 5 days left to launch, we backtracked and decided to display a few high-quality photos.

The Photos

If the photos were to be the highlight of the site, I knew I needed to get the right photo for every section. That meant finding photos that were (1) big enough, (2) angled such that the text would display on a solid color (i.e. the subject of the photo wouldn't be covered by text), and (3) Creative Commons licensed or taken by photographers we knew.

We got a few of the photos from Flickr using their Creative Commons search feature. Others we got by emailing photographers we knew who had photos of colleges. For a few places—the BU and Northeastern photos, for example—I had to go and take pictures myself, with 2 days left until launch.

Final Touches

GoSquared and Google Analytics for analytics. Cloudflare to keep the site up. Some (very) last minute changes to make sure the site displayed somewhat coherently on mobile. Add that all together and you have a functional VC website.

There are still tons of tweaks to make to the site, and I'm not sure it would have come together in the same way if we had more time. That said, it was one of the most busy and exciting weeks of my life, and I'm glad the launch went off without a hitch. Thanks to the team at General Catalyst, the other partners at Rough Draft, and especially Peter for his honest and fast feedback on the many iterations of the site.