Designing a Brand to Last: The Story Behind the New TQ Ventures Look
This post shares our design journey and the thinking behind building a brand that tells a story, resonates with a specific audience, and stands the test of time. We didn’t take the most conventional path, and I wanted to offer a look inside in case it’s helpful to anyone working on their own brand identity.
AT TQ, we’ve always been intentionally under the radar. Until now, we had no brand guide, no PR firm, and no social media presence. Our website was essentially a splash page created in early 2018. It was simple, playful, didn’t take itself too seriously, and focused mostly on our portfolio companies.
The feedback we kept getting from founders was how much they loved it. Who doesn’t love the 80s 8-bit retro gamer aesthetic and the original Macintosh vibe? There’s a sense of nostalgia to it. It’s also a very popular aesthetic you see quite often.
But things are changing. Seven years ago, Schuster and Andrew, Co-Managing Partners, started the firm as “outsiders” and “underdogs.” Today, we manage over $1 billion in assets, have made more than 80 investments globally, and have built a strong reputation we’re proud of among founder and investors communities. It felt like the right time for our brand and website to grow with us.
This wasn’t about making something prettier or doing a rebrand for the sake of it. We were asking bigger questions:
- How do we design a brand and website that reflects who we are and tells our story?
- How do we create something that resonates with our audience, the founders?
- Which parts of our identity can evolve, and which need to remain timeless since we plan to be around for decades?
Design matters more than ever. In a world full of noise, an authentic, opinionated brand helps you truly resonate with your audience.
Let’s dive into it!
The Creative Brief
We started with a creative brief. Thank you to Scout Lab for spending hours interviewing the TQ team and helping pull out of us the direction we wanted to go. The brief is a simple but essential tool. It creates alignment across stakeholders and keeps the process focused.
A typical creative brief includes:
- Background: Context about the brand, market, or timing
- Objectives: What we’re trying to achieve
- Target audience: Who it’s for and what matters to them
- Key messages: What we want people to remember or feel
- Tone and personality: How the brand should sound and come across
- Deliverables: What’s being created
- Timeline: From kickoff to launch
- Stakeholders and approvals: Who’s involved and who signs off
- Budget: Whatever works for your org
Audience
This is marketing 101: know your audience. Who’s your ICP? Who are they, really? What do they care about? How do they think? How do they like to learn, communicate, and consume information? Where do they spend their time, both online and offline?
A brand that truly resonates isn’t built for everyone, it’s built for someone.
For us, that someone is early-stage founders. But not just any founders. We’re drawn to people who are deeply technical or product-oriented. They’re often the kind of people who have been building things since they young kids and from early on had a curiosity to understand how things worked. They don’t need hand-holding, but they do value thoughtful, independent thinking. They want a partner who gets the nuance of what they’re building and can help accelerate their progress in ways that go beyond money.
These founders are curious and multi-dimensional. They might be engineers or designers, but they’re also musicians, extreme sports enthusiasts, vintage record collectors, history nerds. Design matters to them and they notice the details. That’s why we knew the brand had to feel honest, sharp, and quietly confident. Not flashy. Not corporate. Not phony.
The more precisely you understand your audience, the more your brand can feel like it was made just for them.
Logo First (Yes, Really!)
We started with the logo first. Conventional wisdom will tell you to create a whole visual system and let the logo be developed as part of a cohesive package. But I’m someone that likes to hang all my art first, then figure out the furniture.
Quick side note: people often use “logo” as a catch-all, but there’s a difference between a logo and a wordmark. Here’s how Willow Hill, Co-Founder of Scout Lab, defined it for us.
- Logo is the umbrella term. It can be an icon, symbol, monogram, or your name stylized in a unique way. Think of the Nike swoosh or Apple’s apple.
- Lettermark is a type of logo that uses a brand’s initials or a specific letter combination. It’s a minimalist way to represent a brand, especially when the full name is long. Think NASA or IBM.
- Wordmark is a type of logo made entirely of text. It’s your company name, designed with custom type or font treatment. Think Google, Stripe, or Coca-Cola.
- Wordmark and Logo many companies have a combination of both. When designed as a pair, they should feel cohesive and flexible, working together or separately depending on context.
I asked Jason Costello, an old friend and someone I admire for his design eye and deep knowledge about typography, to lead the logo design. Jason was an early designer at GitHub and lead the efforts to redesign and define the company’s brand. GitHub is one of the most iconic developer brands out there, so I knew he was the right person for us.
We had a fun and challenging task: create a brand that blended a cool hacker aesthetic with a quiet sense of luxury.
At the beginning, we put too many constraints on what the logo needed to convey and represent. The logo needed to be playful but strong, modern but timeless, technical but authentically approachable. It was a lot to ask for.
We started by exploring a wordmark for TQ Ventures. The letters “T” and “Q” are strong, geometric shapes. But when paired equally with the word “Ventures,” the weight of the logo shifted. “Ventures” felt too dominant and generic. It didn’t work well vertically either.
We then explored the idea of making a logo for TQ Ventures out of the letters “T” and “Q.”
We loved the logos and thought they were creative works of art, but they didn’t serve the right purpose. None of them could stand on their own. In some designs, it’s hard to tell the letters are “T” and “Q.” It felt like the logo would always need a wordmark next to it, as shown below, and that wordmark came with its own constraints. Suddenly, the whole thing felt busy and unbalanced.
Because TQ Ventures isn’t a well-known fund yet, we need to focus on building a brand around the name and not an unidentifiable logo. The focus needs to be on “TQ,” that’s the differentiator in our name and what we need people to recognize. In our case, the “T” and “Q” naturally lend themselves to a lettermark. They’re strong, bold, and geometric letters, which gave us a strong base to build a timeless and ownable identity.
Jason suggested a typeface to us called N27. We absolutely loved it! It felt like it hit all of our checkboxes: the letters fit well together, it felt strong, durable, modern, and something we would have 30 years from now.
In Jason’s own words:
“The TQ founders had expressed a preference for avoiding serifed or overly curvaceous letterforms. Given that, and knowing the previous iterations, the direction felt clear to me: straightforward and confident.
With the final TQ, there’s a nice sense of proportion and balance between the letters. In some typefaces, the “T” is too narrow and the “Q” too wide, but here, they feel equal. That equality felt meaningful, especially considering the origin of “TQ” and its two founders. The DIN-like, narrow, semi-squared letterforms in N27 came across as strong, confident, and timeless.
A small but notable detail is the subtle tail of the capital “Q,” which creates a defined space around the mark through its unique angles. It felt intuitively right and aligned with the feedback I had been hearing from Jana, Schuster, and Andrew. At a glance, the logo appears confident and no-nonsense without feeling harsh. The typeface also includes some futuristic quirks, which reflected the tone you were aiming for in the overall design.”
When you work with designers that get it, they pull things out of you. They listen to the meaning behind the words. They know how to translate the meaning of your words in a visual language without giving you exactly what you’re asking for. What Jason kept hearing over and over again from us is a deep love of the craft and respect for the founders we back. He ended introducing the heart glyph from the N27 typeface into one of his mockups. What a powerful, yet obvious, symbol to show empathy, love, respect, and approachability. And this is what became the foundation of our brand.
Through this whole process we came to an understanding that brands can evolve. They don’t have to be fixed. Around 80 percent of your brand can shift with time. But what needs to be consistent is your core — and for us, that’s the logo.
Redesigning the Website
Next came the website. This was so much fun! This was how we introduced play and fun into the brand.
We worked with a design duo out of Portland, Oregon called Palette Collective, and took a different approach with them. Instead of being overly prescriptive, we gave them just two brand attributes, no website copy, asked them to highlight the portfolio companies and team, and gave them the freedom to play and experiment.
TQ Brand Attributes
Cool hacker aesthetic
Quiet luxury with muted pantones
Palette Collective came back with something incredible: fourteen thoughtful concepts that reimagined the structure of a website and pushed us toward where we want the brand to go. Across all the designs, the logo stayed consistent. It was the brand elements like color, graphics, typography, and logo treatment where we had room to be more free and playful.
Here are a few of them:
How do you even choose!
With my background as a marketer, I decided to go straight to the source for feedback. I enlisted the help of 25 founder friends to weigh in and conducted 15-minute style interview with no prompts. I walked them through each concept and captured their reactions, both specific responses to individual designs and broader impressions. When you listen closely, clear patterns start to emerge, especially around what makes a brand feel useful, credible, and real to someone seeking capital.
What We Learned
Simplicity wins.
Founders don’t want gimmicks. They don’t want 3D animations or mouse-tracking effects or slow-loading design flourishes. They want clarity. The best sites feel confident, clean, and distraction-free. Beauty lies in simplicity.
Prioritize clarity over cleverness.
Founders come to your site with a purpose. They want to know who you are, what you stand for, and whether you’re someone they want to work with. Don’t bury that behind scroll-jacking or delayed reveals. Lead with the substance.
Pick a direction and commit.
Whether you choose a minimal “quiet luxury” aesthetic or something weird, playful, and retro, the key is to fully own it. Avoid the middle ground. Brands that waffle feel unsure of themselves. The strongest brands feel confident because they are.
Super helpful insights. We ended up choosing the direction that felt most true to TQ’s vision, shaped by thoughtful feedback from exactly the people we want the brand and website to resonate with.
I thought Michael Regan, co-founder of Palette Collective, summed up the TQ brand nicely.
This refresh isn’t about signaling that we’ve grown up or become more corporate. It’s about making sure the outside matches the inside. It’s about giving TQ the visual language it deserves — one that reflects the founders we work with and want to work with, the team behind the scenes, and the values we hold close.
TQ has always been about showing up differently. Now, we have a visual identity that does the same. We’re still the same under-the-radar fund focused on being the best partner to our founders and never loosing our underdog mentality. We’ve just updated the way we tell that story.
Thanks for following along. ❤
