Thanks to Kim Pham at Frontline for this article on their rebranding process. The full article, “Meet the new face of Frontline: deconstructing and rebuilding a VC brand” can be read here.
Removing the brand cobwebs:
This past summer, I spearheaded a very thorough and introspective rebrand of Frontline Ventures — an intimidating task shouldered by the talented Bob Gray and Paul Hughes at the design-centric Red&Grey in Dublin. The process kicked off with “removing the brand cobwebs” — breaking down our previous assumptions about the Frontline brand and starting from scratch. We took the entire team offline and offsite for a one-day workshop, focused on distilling our brand essence — who we are, what we do, how we do it, and why we do it. It actually ended up being a pretty challenging day — spent pushing each other, challenging our assumptions, and checking cross-team alignment. These are the values that would help guide Frontline’s rebrand journey.
Uncovering the Frontline story”
It was after this day of deconstructing brand essence that we realised:
The purpose of Frontline Ventures is to accelerate exceptional founders building global technology companies out of Europe. We do this because we are passionate about helping these founders learn faster than their own speed of experience.
Eventually, this was distilled down further, into what we fondly call a “six-word story.” This six-word story became, in many ways, our north star as we continued further into the rebranding process. “People-powered, capital experience; passionate support.”
Taking small steps towards change:
Just a couple steps in, we had already begun to uncover some insights. First was the switch from “Frontline Ventures” to “Frontline.” Red&Grey noted that we were constantly referring to ourselves as solely Frontline — across daily conversations, both online and offline. We dropped the “Ventures” part of our name because in many ways, it feels too financial or formal — antagonising the very nature of our core “Human” value. In terms of our colour palette, we kept hearing others refer to this “Frontline red” — a very noticeable, if not hallmark colour that pervaded our previous branding. We wanted to keep that, but update the rest of our palette to more contemporary, complementary colours. This would give us more flexibility in the colouring schemes for the many pieces of long-form content we publish throughout the year. We are also excited to present a new imagery system in our typography — little analog glyphs that reflect various words from our everyday lexicon. These symbols give us more mileage than highly visual imagery, and can be used in sequences to nearly tell a story in a graphical way.
Bridging the human & technical:
It was through working with Red&Grey that we were able to uncover all of these elements of our brand and tie something visual to them. We very quickly realised that much of what we do as VCs is bridge the human and the technical — offering our founders both money and support, capital and experience. One of which is highly quantifiable and tangible, the other very qualitative and steeped in subjectivity. To make that marriage visible from a brand perspective, we took a look at typography. The typeface to be used on all branding offline and online is the gorgeous PX Grotesk: modern enough to evoke digital, but not too obvious or ham-fisted. To take this technical typography a step further, we can combine the typography and the glyph system above to create a custom Frontline display typeface. It is a subtle way to reinforce our everyday work. This combination also led to the rebirth of the Frontline logotype — which we are so very proud to own. While our new typeface is a clear ode to our work in technology, Frontline is as much about the humans behind the fund as the software we invest in. At the end of the day, this is a small partnership consisting of very real humans with very real backgrounds and stories. To contrast the clean, crisp PX Grotesk, we worked with Red&Grey to create a custom Frontline “human” typeface — made by hand using bold, swift brush strokes.
Announcing our new rebrand
We hope that, as you browse our new website, you will enjoy the other visual elements to our new brand identity. We are excited about this next chapter of the Frontline story, as we move past our founding moment and into Fund II. It is exciting to finally align our visual aesthetic with our dynamic, evolving team and growing portfolio of seed-stage B2B companies.
Uncovering the Frontline story”
It was after this day of deconstructing brand essence that we realised:
The purpose of Frontline Ventures is to accelerate exceptional founders building global technology companies out of Europe. We do this because we are passionate about helping these founders learn faster than their own speed of experience.
Eventually, this was distilled down further, into what we fondly call a “six-word story.” This six-word story became, in many ways, our north star as we continued further into the rebranding process. “People-powered, capital experience; passionate support.”
Taking small steps towards change:
Just a couple steps in, we had already begun to uncover some insights. First was the switch from “Frontline Ventures” to “Frontline.” Red&Grey noted that we were constantly referring to ourselves as solely Frontline — across daily conversations, both online and offline. We dropped the “Ventures” part of our name because in many ways, it feels too financial or formal — antagonising the very nature of our core “Human” value. In terms of our colour palette, we kept hearing others refer to this “Frontline red” — a very noticeable, if not hallmark colour that pervaded our previous branding. We wanted to keep that, but update the rest of our palette to more contemporary, complementary colours. This would give us more flexibility in the colouring schemes for the many pieces of long-form content we publish throughout the year. We are also excited to present a new imagery system in our typography — little analog glyphs that reflect various words from our everyday lexicon. These symbols give us more mileage than highly visual imagery, and can be used in sequences to nearly tell a story in a graphical way.
Bridging the human & technical:
It was through working with Red&Grey that we were able to uncover all of these elements of our brand and tie something visual to them. We very quickly realised that much of what we do as VCs is bridge the human and the technical — offering our founders both money and support, capital and experience. One of which is highly quantifiable and tangible, the other very qualitative and steeped in subjectivity. To make that marriage visible from a brand perspective, we took a look at typography. The typeface to be used on all branding offline and online is the gorgeous PX Grotesk: modern enough to evoke digital, but not too obvious or ham-fisted. To take this technical typography a step further, we can combine the typography and the glyph system above to create a custom Frontline display typeface. It is a subtle way to reinforce our everyday work. This combination also led to the rebirth of the Frontline logotype — which we are so very proud to own. While our new typeface is a clear ode to our work in technology, Frontline is as much about the humans behind the fund as the software we invest in. At the end of the day, this is a small partnership consisting of very real humans with very real backgrounds and stories. To contrast the clean, crisp PX Grotesk, we worked with Red&Grey to create a custom Frontline “human” typeface — made by hand using bold, swift brush strokes.
Announcing our new rebrand
We hope that, as you browse our new website, you will enjoy the other visual elements to our new brand identity. We are excited about this next chapter of the Frontline story, as we move past our founding moment and into Fund II. It is exciting to finally align our visual aesthetic with our dynamic, evolving team and growing portfolio of seed-stage B2B companies.
