Making a venture capital fund look like the founders it backs
Design and front-end for big_bets, a Brazilian VC that partners with entrepreneurs from Day 1 — awarded an Awwwards Honorable Mention.
Overview
big_bets is a Brazilian venture capital fund that partners with entrepreneurs from Day 1 — often before there is a company at all. Their words: "our ideal moment to first connect is when the company, in case it even exists, is no more than a blank sheet of paper."
They needed a site that said that out loud, in a market where every other fund's site looks like a bank's.
Role
I was both the designer and the developer on this one. Art direction, UI, and then every line of front-end on top of WordPress.
A slightly dangerous position — nobody tells you your idea is too expensive to build — but nothing got lost in a hand-off either.
The problem
Venture capital sites in Brazil all converge on the same look: navy blue, a glass building, a grid of portfolio logos, copy that could belong to any of them. That's a problem for a fund whose entire pitch is that they behave like entrepreneurs, not investors.
If you claim to show up on day one, when everything is broken and nothing works yet, and your site looks like a private bank — the founder reading it doesn't believe you.
My challenge was to build a site that felt like it was made by builders, for builders — and to make the craft itself the proof.
My approach
#1 Start from the language
Before any pixels, I worked through their positioning copy with them. The lowercase-with-underscore naming — big_bets, bruno_betenson — came out of that, and then drove the entire visual system.
#2 Find one loud idea
Rather than a full brand world, I bet on a single move: a developer-terminal aesthetic in neon yellow. One idea, executed everywhere, beats five ideas executed politely.
#3 Design in Adobe XD
Screens, states and the menu were prototyped in XD so the client could click through the navigation before I wrote any JavaScript. The menu was the riskiest part, so it got prototyped first.
#4 Build it myself
WordPress for the CMS, GSAP and ScrollMagic for motion, hand-written JS for everything else. Designing and building meant I could keep tuning the animation timings by feel, in the browser, for as long as it took.
A terminal, not a boardroom
The whole identity hangs on one colour: #CCFF28, a neon yellow-green that has no business being on a financial services website. Paired with near-black backgrounds and Rubik set tight, it reads like a code editor. That was exactly the point — the audience is technical founders, and this is the palette they stare at all day.
Everything else follows from it. Names are typed lowercase with underscores, like variables. Illustrations are flat, retro, single-weight line drawings rather than the usual 3D gradient blobs — the whole thing feels drawn rather than licensed.
The home page opens with a headline that types itself out, the last clause landing in neon: "We support the entrepreneurs who are building the largest tech companies of the next generation." I wrote that typewriter by hand rather than pulling a library, mostly so I could randomise the delay between keystrokes. Even typing reads as a machine; jittered typing reads as a person. Fifteen lines of difference, and it's the entire effect.
Screenshot needed
Full-width desktop screenshot of bigbets.tech home page hero, ideally mid-typing so the cursor and the neon-yellow clause are both visible.
The menu, the team and the 404
Three pieces got disproportionate attention, and they're the three people mention.
The menu is a full-screen takeover in neon on black, nav items laid out asymmetrically across a grid instead of stacked in a tidy list. It's the first interaction most visitors have, so it sets expectations for everything after.
The team page renders each partner's portrait as a dithered halftone in the same neon, next to a column of raw JavaScript used purely as texture. Names link straight to LinkedIn. A team section that looks like a terminal buffer is a strange thing for a VC fund, and precisely why it works.
And the 404 is a full ASCII-art illustration, wrapped in aria-hidden so screen readers skip the character soup and get the real message instead — my one concession to being a responsible adult about it.
The build
The honest inventory of what's under it.
WordPress, because the fund needed to publish clippings and update the team without calling me. The install is hardened — theme and plugin paths rewritten to opaque hashes, so it doesn't advertise itself as WordPress to every scanner on the internet.
GSAP (TweenMax) and ScrollMagic drive the motion. The centrepiece is the home page scroll sequence: a pinned illustration stage that steps through three states as you scroll past, so the three-part story about how they work with founders animates in place instead of scrolling by. Each step is a pinned scene toggling a class, choreography handled in CSS — cheap to retune, cheap to run.
Everything else is deliberately small and hand-written: the typewriter, the menu toggle, a scroll observer that inverts the header over neon sections, progressive-disclosure blocks for the long philosophy copy. No framework — it would have been more code than the site.
I also built a GSAP cursor: two chasing dots that scale up over anything interactive. It's still in the source, commented out. It fought with the site's own personality and I killed it — but I'd rather leave the corpse in the file than pretend I never tried it.
One loud idea, carried all the way through to the 404, beats five careful ones.
Outcome & recognition
The site picked up an Awwwards Honorable Mention on 28 February 2022 — 8.0 design, 7.9 creativity, 7.7 usability, 7.5 content, 7.6 overall. The votes called out the menu, the team section and the 404.
The part I'm actually proud of is duller: it's still live and still in service. Years on, big_bets are still publishing to it, the design hasn't been quietly replaced, and my name is still in the footer.
- Awwwards Honorable Mention — 28 Feb 2022
- Design 8.0 · Creativity 7.9 · Usability 7.7 · Content 7.5
- Overall 7.6 / 10 (community)