Homepage treated as an editorial spread: feature headline, deep navy surface, long-form copy in place of bullet points.
A concept editorial website for a South African corporate finance firm, designed to feel like a long-form magazine feature rather than a corporate brochure.
Corporate finance firm websites tend toward two clichés. The first is stock photography: handshakes over conference tables, the Johannesburg skyline at dusk, a man in a suit looking thoughtfully at a window. The second is sterile minimalism that says nothing and feels like it could belong to any firm in any country.
I wanted to design a site for a small South African finance firm that felt like a publication rather than a brochure. The differentiator of a small firm is the founder's voice: how they think about deals, how they treat clients, what they believe about the country they work in. The site's job is to make space for that voice, not to hide it behind generic professional reassurance.
Homepage treated as an editorial spread: feature headline, deep navy surface, long-form copy in place of bullet points.
The headline "Built on integrity, rooted in South Africa" is set like a magazine feature opener, with italics carrying the rhythm rather than decorating it. The page reads top-to-bottom like a long-form article. A landing page sells a product; an editorial spread invites a reader to spend time. For a finance firm whose differentiator is trust, time-on-page is the right metric to design for.
Most finance sites use navy as a navigation colour and white as the canvas. I inverted it. Corporate finance demands gravitas, and gravitas comes from committing to a colour, not sprinkling it. Navy carrying the surface also let the typography breathe in a way it wouldn't on white — every word feels considered against the depth of the background.
The natural impulse for a corporate site is to break everything into scannable lists: services, sectors, team members, deal types. For a small firm whose advantage is the founder's voice, this is exactly the wrong move. Bullet points strip out voice. The site keeps the copy in paragraphs because the paragraphs are the product.
The headline uses italics on "rooted" to emphasise the South African positioning, which is the firm's real claim. The top navigation is sized down and spaced out to recede; in editorial design, the masthead supports the feature, it doesn't compete with it. Most corporate sites get this hierarchy backwards.
Bullet points strip out voice. The paragraphs are the product.
The site currently reads as one extended About page. The harder problem is what the Clients and Services pages look like, because finance firms have to talk about their work without breaching confidentiality. You can't name the deals, you can't name the clients, you sometimes can't even name the sectors.
That constraint is itself a design problem: how do you demonstrate competence without showing evidence? The next iteration would tackle the Clients page by treating each entry as an anonymised case file — sector, deal size range, structure type, outcome — written in the same editorial register as the homepage. Maintaining the magazine voice through pages that have less to say is where the project would prove itself.