Website design and development for HVM Deal Partners, a Los Angeles investment bank: restrained institutional design, explanatory motion, and an accessible build.
The Challenge
HVM Deal Partners is a boutique investment bank in Los Angeles focused on private technology markets. A firm like that needs a website that looks senior and discreet. It can’t look like a startup landing page, and it can’t oversell. The copy came from the client’s own roadmap, and every word has to stay exactly as approved. The client also wanted interactive motion, while the brand called for quiet authority. The site had to do both without the movement becoming decoration.
Our Approach
We set the brand’s personality out in a short brief: precise, discreet, senior. The palette is deep navy for weight, a single gold accent and ivory for the “correspondence” moments. Source Serif 4 carries the voice and Inter carries the facts. We tried a more delicate display serif first and dropped it because it read too fragile for a bank. The client’s gold H-shield mark sits beside a typeset wordmark that we tuned to match the headline type.
Every animation had to explain something. The hero’s canvas shows counterparties being matched, and each of the three service tabs has a diagram showing how that service works. All motion stops under the system’s reduced-motion setting and under a “Reduce motion” option in the site’s own accessibility panel. The animations load only after the page is ready, so they don’t slow the first paint. We also kept a list of design decisions the client had already made: no custom cursors, no marquees, no scroll-jacking, no oversized footer wordmark.
The site is a static Astro build on Cloudflare. All copy comes from one source file, which feeds the page, the structured data and a markdown version for AI agents. The build fails if the approved copy changes, if axe-core finds an accessibility violation or if an email address appears anywhere in the output. The contact form posts to a server-side function, so the recipient address never reaches the browser. Visits from AI assistants and fetches by AI crawlers are reported to analytics from the edge.
Where It Stands
The site is built and in final review with the client ahead of launch. It isn’t public yet, so these screenshots come from the production build.
Results
- Single-page site with Expertise, About and Contact sections, plus privacy and accessibility pages
- Animated hero and three service diagrams that each explain a mechanism, all switchable off
- Build gates for verbatim approved copy, zero axe-core violations and no email address in the output
- Contact form delivered server-side, with the recipient address kept out of the site entirely
01Expertise section: tabbed list of three disciplines beside an illustration of shares moving from holder to investor
02Ivory interlude reading Two counterparties. One executed deal., above the start of the navy About section
03About section with a large serif statement and an orbit diagram linking institutions, funds, shareholders and companies
04Contact section: Let's discuss your transaction, beside a white inquiry form with name, email, organization and message fields
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