Sample Screen 1: Bessemer Venture Partners Homepage At left is the Bessemer Venture Partners homepage. In addition to the aesthetic and strategic themes described below, we were trying to create distinct areas for casual browsers, which we marked with olive tabs, and for the portfolio companies and capital parnters, which are marked with blue tabs. Sprinkled throughout the site are small graphics taken from historical sources relevant to the era of Henry Phipps and Carnegie Steel.

Project Description:
I wrote the following (with minor edits by BVP) for the "About This Site" section of the Bessemer Venture Partners site, and it sums up the relevant aesthetic and strategic themes nicely:

"Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) crafted this web site to deliver online resources for the employees and prospective employees of our portfolio companies, our investors, and prospective partners.

Assisted by the creative staff at BaseSix, we complemented the functionality of the site with a visual tone that evinces the rich history of our fim, dating back to the nineteenth century when Henry Phipps co-founded Carnegie Steel. By recalling our roots, we celebrate a heritage of technical innovation and entrepreneurial spirit rooted in the revolutionary steel refining process invented by Sir Henry Bessemer in 1856, and preserved to this day by entrepreneurs who continue to re-invent our world.

With that in mind, the design of the site uses typography, photography, and graphics that clearly echo turn-of-the-century conventions, but with a more modern treatment.

The dominant typefaces are Copperplate Gothic and Caslon (Figure 1), two elegant and historically relevant type designs. Copperplate Gothic, an early 1900s design by the great Frederic Goudy, was chosen for its visual clarity and readablity, its historical appropriateness (it was designed at approximately the same time as BVP's inception), and its popular association with commercial applications, such as early advertising and signage. Caslon, a truly august type used to set the first printed versions of the Declaration of Independence and much favored by Benjamin Franklin, was chosen for its simple beauty, historical authenticity, and because of its ability to stand alongside the BVP logotype fonts ITC Legacy Serif and Centaur.

The color palette of the site, a muted scheme of grays, blues, olives and parchment, evokes both a feeling of antiquity and solidity, underscoring BVP's strength and constancy.

The site graphics were inspired, in part, by the art of old stocks and bonds, whose exquisite detail was impossible to reproduce in the low-resolution world of web graphics.

Visitors to our site will see many images from the era of BVP's founding, including a photograph of Sir Henry Bessemer's residence (look above the menu) and several diagrams and etchings of Bessemer furnaces and other processing equipment. In addition, the photographs of the BVP investor team have been manipulated to resemble etchings, in keeping with what would have been a standard printing technique.

We present these visual references to Bessemer's history using both newspaper-style columns and common web design motifs like tabs, "liquid" browser scaling, and rollover effects. Again, emphasizing the strand liking old and new.

The contrasts on this site reflect dramatic changes in information technology over the last century--and yet history teaches us that today's technology will seem equally primitive in the year 2100. Just imagine all the innovation in the century ahead!"