Marqevon — corporate site for a petroleum trading principal

01Context

A principal, not a broker

Marqevon is a physical petroleum trading principal: it buys from producers and refiners and delivers to refiners, distributors, airlines, utilities and industrial users. Its site speaks to counterparties first, then banks and trade-finance partners, then candidates, then press and regulators.

The work was spec-driven from the start. A 46 KB specification fixed the information architecture, the design system and all 15 pages before the build, and it opens by rejecting the usual brief: in this industry a website’s job is not marketing, it is projecting verifiable legitimacy.

02Problem

The fraud channel has a dialect

Physical commodity trading has a fraud problem, and the fraud has a vocabulary: informal brokers announce themselves with a recognisable set of instrument acronyms and mandate titles — TTT, TTV, DTA, ATB. A legitimate mid-size principal that uses any of it reads as one of them.

So the whole site had to answer one question, in seven languages, two of them written right to left.

“Is this entity real and checkable, or is it another broker-chain front? Design so the answer is obvious within the first screen.”
— The information-architecture and design specification · Written before the build, as the test for every page

03Research

Whitespace the majors don’t market

A competitive benchmark scored the intended design against the largest trading houses and a set of mid-size peers. The gap it found was worth owning: none of the majors explicitly markets an anti-fraud position, or says what it will not do.

That finding became structure rather than a slogan: a “What we don’t do” group in the FAQ, an open welcome to independent verification, and a list of terms the copy must never use.

Marqevon on desktop — the FAQ list, closing on a “What we don’t do” group about leased bank instruments and below-market discounts — Figure 02The FAQ ends on what the firm will not do: leased bank instruments, off-market set-asides, guaranteed below-market discounts.

04Approach

A precision instrument for a market built on trust

The specification fixed the direction in one line — “Precision instrument for a market built on trust” — somewhere between an institutional energy desk and a verified inspection document, and named what to avoid: cream with a serif and terracotta, black with acid green, and hairlines as the whole aesthetic.

The work ran benchmark, specification, build, then one round of client feedback, and the feedback was audited against the code before any of it was applied.

Of roughly 67 instructions in the client’s feedback, 33 survived the audit as cards; 8 needed a correction first, 22 were blocked on open decisions, and 4 were questions.

Four passes, each one written down

01
BenchmarkThe majors and mid-size peers, scored against the intended design
02
SpecificationInformation architecture, design system and 15 pages

Marqevon on desktop — seven numbered steps shared by every delivery mode, from qualification to reconciliation — Figure 03One shared sequence for every delivery mode: independently verifiable evidence comes before any financial commitment.

05Solution

The Ledger Reference System

The specification says where to spend: “Spend the boldness here; keep everything else quiet.” The signature has three parts — reference chips attached to credibility claims, data manifests set as hairline-ruled monospace inspection certificates, and a monospace identity bar at the foot of every page.

The palette is built for it: an abyssal petroleum ground, maritime steel, document paper, brass as the one accent, a verified teal kept well away from acid green, and rust for red flags only. IBM Plex Mono carries every number, reference and chip.

Underneath: Payload 3.85 and Next.js 16.2 with next-intl on MongoDB — 10 collections and 4 globals — served through nginx, with a buyer-qualification intake that scores each enquiry and flags it for the desk.

Marqevon on desktop — the governance manifest, a monospace table of identity facts with registry and LEI chips and values still to be supplied

Marqevon on desktop — three products listed by specification: EN 590 diesel, Jet A-1 and naphtha

Marqevon on desktop — the rule for publishing a track record: only after commercial and legal validation, without counterparty names

06Key decisions

Five decisions about trust

Most of them are about what the site refuses to say.

01
Spend the boldness in one place
A trading firm that looks designed reads as marketing. The signature system carries all the visual confidence and every other surface stays quiet, so the manifests are what a reader remembers.
Alternatives
A bold brand across every surface
Trade-off
The site looks sparse to anyone expecting a campaign.
02
Make the rules fail the build
Two guards run in CI. One fails on the fraud channel’s vocabulary and on American spelling in the site’s copy; the other on physical-direction layout utilities, hard-coded fonts and untranslated strings. The second has already caught a real miss: an accessible label that escaped translation.
Alternatives
A written style guide
Trade-off
A guard protects only the files it reads.
03
Escalate legal exposure instead of deciding it
Questions that carried legal exposure were not the designer’s to settle. They went to the client in a written memo, and one recommended wording was declined there in favour of contract-qualified, non-promissory language.

07Seven locales

Seven locales, two right to left

English, French, Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and Persian carry every message key in exact parity — 222 keys in each file at the last commit. Arabic and Persian run on CSS logical properties, so the layout mirrors instead of being rebuilt.

Two details only showed up in use. A per-language font swap written inside a cascade layer was silently overridden, so it now sits outside the layers; and the manifests use tabular numerals, so monospace columns still align under right-to-left and CJK text.

Marqevon on desktop — the Persian home page, mirrored right to left with the navigation reversed

Marqevon on desktop — the Arabic home page, mirrored right to left

08Every page

Thirty-four pages, one system

Every English page of the deployment, captured on 26 September 2026 at 1,440 pixels wide and on a 390-pixel phone: the sixteen top-level pages, the buyer-qualification intake, two career postings, twelve insight articles and three legal pages.

The interior pages carry the same hairline data manifests and monospace identity bar as the signature ones, and on a phone each page stacks into a single column, the navigation behind a menu button. On the home page, the market-price panel is masked.

Marqevon on desktop — Home, the first screen

Marqevon on desktop — About, the first screen

09Outcomes

Deployed, not launched

The site is deployed and serving, but not launched: it has no domain, stays out of search on purpose, and its identity facts are still placeholders. The applied feedback sits in an unpushed commit, not on the server. There is no analytics, only container health checks.

Integration tests passing: 142; Beside lint, both guards and a production build, on the feedback branch.; Measured outcome · Design-feedback board, 7 September 2026
Feedback cards applied in code: 32 / 33; One held on an open decision; none yet verified on a running app.; Measured outcome · Design-feedback roadmap
Restore-verified backups: Nightly, each one restored to prove it works, plus a recovery package before any release that migrates content.; Delivered output
An immutable-image deploy path: Releases ship as fixed images; the mutable latest tag and polled updates are retired.; Delivered output

What was delivered

Seven locales in parity
Two CI guards
Governance manifest
Buyer-qualification intake

10What I learned

The trust device that didn’t do anything

01
The most useful output was a lint rule
Encoding “don’t speak the fraud channel’s dialect” as a guard moved it from an intention someone has to remember into a property of the repository.
02
A guard protects only what it reads
The content guard scans copy and message files, not the form’s option lists, so the buyer-qualification form still offers two of the banned terms as delivery options. On the one page where the firm screens others, it speaks the dialect it forbids.
03
A trust device has to do something
The reference chips name a registry or the LEI index but link to neither. Until they point at a real record, the signature device only looks like verification — the exact failure the project set out to avoid.
04
Confirm structural decisions in writing first
Seven locales shipped weeks before a client governance document called the language question undecided. Keeping them was right, since deleting finished, guarded work is the costlier mistake, but the decision belonged in writing before the keys existed.

Language

Marqevon — corporate site for a petroleum trading principal

A principal, not a broker

The fraud channel has a dialect

Whitespace the majors don’t market

A precision instrument for a market built on trust

Four passes, each one written down

The Ledger Reference System

Five decisions about trust

Spend the boldness in one place

Make the rules fail the build

Escalate legal exposure instead of deciding it

Seven locales, two right to left

Thirty-four pages, one system

Deployed, not launched

What was delivered

The trust device that didn’t do anything

The most useful output was a lint rule

A guard protects only what it reads

A trust device has to do something

Confirm structural decisions in writing first

Audit client feedback before applying it

Leave placeholders rather than invent identity