01 — City Light Capital
An impact fund whose brand was different enough to read as unserious. Four years of reports, decks and web that made it look established without making it look like everyone else.
The 2023 reportImpact Ventures IV: contents, story, team, approach, measurement and portfolio pages, all on one system.
City Light invests only in companies working on healthcare, education and climate. That is a real difference in a field where most firms are interchangeable, and their brand did reflect it — bright color, unusual geometry, nothing like the navy-and-serif uniform of finance.
The trouble was that it read as unserious. Beside the firms they were raising alongside, the brand undersold them. Someone deciding where to place capital was being asked to take a chance on a firm whose materials looked lighter than its track record.
The brief, unofficially, was to make them look established without making them look like everyone else.
The annual impact report had been living as a poorly functioning web page, and one that was a challenge for the team to maintain. Moving it to a designed PDF follows how these documents are actually used — forwarded, annotated, read on a plane, pulled up in a meeting. It is the industry standard for that reason, and it gives the report the authority of a document an investor keeps.
Typography is where the credibility had to come from. The expected move was the classic finance look, but it would have erased exactly what made City Light worth backing. The face carries weight and a certain grandeur while staying modern, so the firm reads as substantial without reading as conventional.
Finance is literal, and in plenty of places it has to be. But an impact report is a story about where money went and what it did, and the story needed room to come through.
I went through every fund and portfolio company, took in everything they gave me, and distilled it to what carried the story. Then I laid it out for how it gets read — which is not front to back. Most readers of these documents come looking for one specific thing. So a running tab bar sits at the head of every page and marks where you are, the figures resolve at a glance, and the argument is still intact for anyone who reads the whole thing.
Scannable, in other words, without being thin.
City Light kept its existing mark, a shaded, three-dimensional logo. I built a flat isometric system around it — hexagons and linework that pick up the logo’s geometry and resolve it into something current.
The team was unsure at first, a flat system beside a dimensional logo is an unusual pairing. I made the case that the contrast was the point, carrying the brand forward while the logo stayed recognizable. The hexagons became the part of the system they valued most.
The dataEvery portfolio company mapped by goal and theme, per fund and across all funds.
How they make money is how they have impact.
Two funds, successive annual reports, investor decks and web. I worked as a contractor, directly with the SVP of Operations, and decisions were made together — the isometric system is a fair picture of how it went: I made the case, they tested it, and we landed somewhere better than either starting position.
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OneThread — a brand and its sub-brands, built from the name outward.
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