Skip to content
Hidden Ventures Wavy Circle Mark Black

How we helped Hidden Ventures create a new look for their creative fund

Render worked with Hidden Ventures to develop a modern brand identity that reflects their mission of supporting creatives and built a brand guide, website, and collateral that reflected this new look.

Small Hidden-Ventures-Laptop2-Mockup2 copy

Services

Brand Identity
Brand Guidlines
Website Design
Collateral

Tools

Figma
Cargo

Website

hddn.vc
OVERVIEW

Modern society demands creativity, and not only from its artists. Creativity is celebrated in business, education, and science, and it is arguably the driving force behind our contemporary innovation economy.

The process of bringing something new into the world requires a certain tension between the wild abandon of novelty and the measured discernment needed to hone ideas. Hidden Ventures, a new venture capital fund headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, invests in companies that work inside that creative tension.

In their own words, Hidden Ventures “believes that creatives of all types disrupt, beautify, and challenge our communities to be better, if creatives win, we win. We seek to build a portfolio of products that helps unlock creativity, strengthens communities, and empowers creatives to flourish.”

The Challenge

Hidden Ventures addresses a gap in the traditional venture capital space by intentionally investing into the often-overlooked creative industry. Although a relatively new fund, Hidden has already made several key investments into fast-growing startups that are helping creatives flourish, including Chroma, Breef, Audioshake, Along, Studio, and Blockstars.  A dream team of advisors, including Anna Sian (Spotify), Greg Lutze (VSCO), Sarita Alami (Mailchimp), Jessica Toy (Angelist), Mark Saab (YBCA, Felt Zine), Squint, and Ben Terry, collectively oversee Hidden’s unique investment process 

With its impressive portfolio expanding quickly, Hidden Ventures wanted to ensure they were keeping up with their own development, and required a fresh brand identity that reflected the creativity and importance of their work.

So that’s what we did.

Approach

We worked with Hidden Ventures to develop a modern brand identity that reflects their mission of supporting creatives and built a brand guide, website, and collateral that reflected this new look. Hidden Ventures needed a brand identity that was both modern and timeless to appeal to creatives of all disciplines and stand up to the ever-changing world of design trends. 

When we met with Hidden, there were many different aesthetic directions being pitched as potential brand design avenues. Together, we worked through narrowing down ideas and merging aesthetics to create an identity that made the most sense for Hidden and supported their ideas and brand messaging.

Through our Render branding process, we worked with Hidden to identify their primary areas of inspiration: Swiss design, brutalism, Dadaism, and fashion branding. We looked to create a minimal and versatile brand that could serve as a solid foundation from which to build a variety of brand elements, including secondary and tertiary logotypes for the Hidden logo in different type styles/aesthetics and brand iconography/graphics.

"Render helped us to hone in our vision for our brand and then took that vision and made it a reality. Their design process made it easy for us to accomplish our goal."

Ben Terry, Managing Director, Hidden Ventures

Hidden Ventures_Ben Terry_Headshot-1
LOGOTYPE

For the primary logotype, we leaned into inspiration from Brutalist architecture intermingled with a strong Swiss-type style. We wanted the primary logotype to have a unique character to it, be able to stand out against the multitude of other sans-serif logotypes, and not be so over-the-top that you wouldn’t be able to read it. We also intentionally designed the logo to be a variable type, which allowed us to create a few different logotype styles that all fit together aesthetically but give some vibrant variety to the brand.

Hidden Ventures Wavy Circle Mark Black
SECONDARY LOGO

We created a secondary logotype that offered an additional style that is complementary to the primary. The secondary logotype is a wavy logotype which we hand-drew specifically for Hidden and serves as a more playful and fun brand interaction. This logotype was inspired by the more “groovy” type styles of late 1960s/early 1970s design.

WEBSITE & COLLATERAL

With the foundation of the brand identity complete, we translated the new look and feel into a fresh web design and collateral materials. We leveraged our own brand guide to design the new website that was put into development and brought to life for an efficient launch. Then we got to have some fun designing the physical materials like hats, sweatshirts, and stationery that help bring the brand to life in the real world.

Hidden Ventures Phone Mockup copy
Hidden Ventures Stationery Mockup2
Hidden Ventures Notebook Mockups copy
Hidden Biz Cards Mockup
Hidden Ventures Hoodie Mockup copy-1
Hidden Bag on Bench Mockup-1
Hidden Ventures Tshirt Design-1
RESULTS

From idea to inspiration to in-the-real-world, we worked with the Hidden team every step of the way to develop a new brand that helped them achieve their vision and communicate their creative spirit to their investors, portfolio companies, and partners.

Their team says that “with our new brand identity that Render created for us, Hidden now has the foundation we needed to communicate our story and grow our fund.” We hope that the results speak for themselves.