CDWG Aug Update & Your Opinions On Our New Owl

[0x_Dev]

Hi Owls.

I hope you enjoyed your August. Here’s the monthly update from CDWG - slightly shorter this month, as less seems to happen in August.

Reminder of goals

The goals of CDWG II were:

1. Website: finish design stage and assist in build stage of new website
2. General design work: continue to assist other Owls and WGs in the long-term ambition of becoming ‘the best designed DAO in DeFi’

Major progress against goals in August:

1. Website: candidly - for some engineering reasons I’ve now moved to fix with some deeply appreciated help from @dylan and the wider Engineering team - we’ve not moved forward much in August. The design work is essentially done, some helpful engineering assets have been built - to power our blog and some dynamic numbers (example: TVL) - but we’re yet to deploy the bulk of the work and realize the project. However, thanks again to Dylan for jumping in to help resource the technical project management and release plan. We hope by next month’s update this project is delivered.

2. General design execution:

→ 3D Cooper: creating a 3D owl mascot, we can use in a range of marketing locations. @codeMathics has continued to lead an amazing charge here, with valuable support from @Earth2Travis. While Cooper is still in the polish phase, and not fully finalized, you’ll notice the advances from last month to a variety of Cooper-in-situ styles below:

Amazing, no?! I should say this project is still in flow, and not finished, but we cannot wait to deploy Cooper as our mascot - and if you have ideas as to where and how to use him/her please let us know here. We’d also love your general feedback on Cooper’s look n feel - as well as his/her name. Names used in CDWG so far include these - which do you like most? And what gender is our owl?

Name the Index Coop owl

• Cooper
• Indie
• Owlie
• Indie D’Cooper
• I.C.Owl

What gender is the Index Coop owl

• Male
• Female
• Other

→ Social media assets & videos: @Caf @Static121 and Earth_Maze (not in forum) have continued to create some incredible social assets and Caf and Static have managed our Twitter with such panache and verve this last month or so. If you’ve wondered what was behind the incredibly high level of design execution on Twitter, you now know it’s these two. There’s an insane amount to give kudos to here, but I’d cite these pieces as good examples of this great work:

We have a newly joined Dowl working on the DATA launch video, which we look forward to featuring - and giving him some kudos - next month. And speaking of video, Earth_Maze’s MVI video this month was 2x-fire.

As always, there was lots more design work done, the above is merely a citation of some of the most potentially interesting. More to come next month and we look forward to tonnes of work, and supporting design work, in the last four months of the year.

Thanks also to @Static121 and @mestigoit for handling a few community calls in August. Thanks also to @pujimak_in for some great, general project management work this month too.

Finally, kudos to the CDWG for being awesome and so welcoming.

We welcome your feedback, ideas and collaboration,
Dev

Helpful design related links:

1. Non-designers please submit your design requests here
2. Find design assets and resources here
3. Find the newly branded Google Slide template here
4. Say hi in the #Design Discord channel here
5. New designers looking to join can start here

[Crypto_Texan]

Loving the Cowlboy over here

[ElliottWatts]

Artiste - a personal favorite of mine - would love to see some of these on t-shirts!! You are all killing it on the design front. Great work this month!

[0x_Dev]

Feel the love coming in @codemathics !

[mestigoit]

Dude, you already have a good personal branding. When I saw this cowboy Cooper, I just thought: this must be something for the Crypto Texan. It works.

[catjam]

Love these! Great work by the CDWG

No need for our Owl to have a gender. Let’s take this as an opportunity to be inclusive and use gender neutral pronouns when referring to them!

[BigSky7]

Wow!!!

This is awesome work. Cooper is coming together insanely well - that is what a world class mascot looks like. Love all the different personalities. Also huge shout-out for how awesome the entire CDWG team is to work with. Everyone is super professional and capable - every time I work with CDWG it is an absolute pleasure.

Keep up the amazing work!

( @Crypto_Texan we may have to split the Cowboy Cooper, unless @codemathics can make me a Cooper dressed as an ancient warrior )

[mestigoit]

One wick thought about the gender and the personalities. I think this create some conflicts. At least in my brain.
Some of these personalities have strong stereotypes on gender. This is of course, just my personal view. If we really want to make it unspecified and that’s what I always had in mind when I was pushing this project then we have to carefully think about clothes, attitude, esprit etc. Just something to think about.

[0x_Dev]

What about creating some NFTs of Cooper (seems to be most popular name atm) @codemathics @earth2travis ?

Any solidity engineers reading fancy helping?

Could be a blast.

[codemathics]

Lol, that is something definitely worth trying @BigSky7

[codemathics]

Hey @mestigoit

Definitely get your point on this, however, like we discussed during our calls, the idea for these personalities was to have a rough overview of how Cooper can be be rigged, or better stated, tweaked to become anything he/she wants to be. Obviously we cannot make one Cooper to represent two separate genders at this time, but depending on what it needs to be used for, Cooper can be anything.

The next coming weeks, we will be looking at ways to get it to be less stereotype and like you rightly mentioned, the clothes, the expressions and other features can make that so. Awesome thoughts here by the way.

[pvmihalache]

Cooper sound appropriate… but if will have a middle name Owen sounds the closest to Owl
Owen Cooper has a good vibe

[seblavoie]

Owl my god, this looks awesome! Modeling and rig are great!

Just my two cents about the gender question, I tend to agree with @mestigoit and @catjam that keeping it unspecified would be a good solution whenever possible. I don’t have an opinion on the clothing styles that stereotype each gender, so I’ll leave this one up to you.

As for the language part, I think a solution could be to avoid gendering the mascot by using the non-human gender-neutral pronoun “it”? We could use the name Cooper (or else) as the main pronoun as often as possible, and when not possible use “it” or “its”.

If we translate things to other Latin languages like French, which is the one I know, this will not be possible though, and gender has to be used more often. I don’t know how much this matters, but that’s just something worth considering.

[LemonadeAlpha]

I guess I’ll bite the bullet and say I don’t really vibe with the 3d owl and have had quite a few others share this with me privately as well.

[0x_Dev]

Could you and these others be constructive enough to share - here or via DMs:

• What you don’t like?
• What you would like instead?
• Anything else related?

This feedback is coming in somewhat after the fact - though we are making moves in DWG to make the owl more cleanly fit with the website and current brand framework and also evolve the general brand framework too as we introduce more video and content types on social and at events.

[LemonadeAlpha]

I’ll let others choose if they’d like to comment, my personal issue is that I think it looks like a kids television show character and I don’t understand the association it makes with our brand - or our other visual branding

I’m just not sure I think we need/needed a 3d mascot - are there examples of fin products / fintechs that do something like this (know there’s DAVE)?

I didn’t really have the courage to speak up because its just one man’s opinion but after hearing several others unanimously concur in unique settings I thought I’d share. I was hopeful I’d gain more comfort but after seeing it deployed a few times I have not moved (maybe even more strongly opposed).

[MrMadila]

Hi @0x_Dev, I fully appreciate a lot of work and time has gone into this. Personally I guess I was waiting to see the final product before making a judgement. In hindsight, feedback earlier in the process may have been much more productive. Thanks to cdwg efforts our branding to date has come on leaps and bounds, the lead time on Cooper I think has meant that from a design perspective Cooper is now out of sync with the “flatter” more simple look we will soon be rolling out on the new site etc.
I’m also not a designer Etc so was hesitant to weight in earlier but unfortunately atm I too feel the mismatch LA has expressed.
I still reserve judgement on the concept as if anyone can pull it off its you guys.
Fully aware that this may come as a disappointment, I’m fully committed to providing productive feedback as best I can.

[0x_Dev]

@LemonadeAlpha @MrMadila

Thanks for the deeper info. That is helpful - feel empowered to share earlier next time.

We’re actually partially aligned, I think - and we’re working on some things in DWG re the brand framework which will include Cooper. The 3D work is strong but Cooper needs some translation work for certain contexts. Example: a webpage with a matt, flat retro colour scheme where Cooper is currently gloss, with a sheen. He’s also high def. We might need a family of Cooper executions for different contexts.

Credit is due to @caf and @Static121 for the work mentioned above which will take a bit of time to fruit.