Hi Owls.
Another month, another CDWG update. Time is FLI’in by!
Context setting
Recap of goals of CDWG II to benchmark against:
- Website: finish design stage and assist in build stage of new website
- General design work: continue to assist other Owls and WGs in the long-term, ambition of becoming ‘the best designed DAO in DeFi’
Progress against specific goals in July:
1. Website:
A. Design: essentially done, as detailed here (thank you for your engagement and votes!), barring the odd small polish and touch up.
B. Build: we’re deep into the build phase now.
Thanks go to @Emil_ETH - for building most of the marketing pages in Webflow, @Defijesus - for helping coordinate and access a number of non-core engineering resources, as well as @mestigoit - for design polish here and there and @pujimak_in - for project management help. There will be other Owls to thank in the next update, who are just sinking their talons into a range of front end engineering and general project tasks. We’re excited to see the build really take shape.
I am working with @Defijesus to give a potential timeline and release date to aim at. [Will update this post later].
2. General design execution: I hope we’re continuing to deliver KOs here, feedback continues to be extremely positive, and I’d show a few examples of high quality work the Dowls (Design Owls) have done in July - which I continue to find inspiring:
A. 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 his work being organized here. I insert a few highlights below.
We will share a formal Forum post when we have 3D Cooper ready to release into the wild!
@earth2travis has been a vital partner to @codeMathics in this work too - a huge help. And, you can find his ideas doc for where we can use 3D Cooper around the Web here. Example: imagine 3D Cooper on the 404/broken link page!
On Cooper, how perfect is he/she!? I cannot wait to see him/her become a key pillar of our brand. Now I’ve seen Cooper imagined by these Dowls, I cannot stop thinking about him/her.
B. MVI merch: @Caf and @Static121 created some head-turning merch for MVI, as detailed here.
The core artwork leveraged is inserted below:
A fantastic communication of ‘The Metaverse’, I would suggest. Lovely.
Also, is it a coincidence that MVI’s price has pumped in the month this merch was released for purchase? Clearly design - and CDWG - moves markets!
C. Canva banners file, scaling the ability of non-designers to create and deploy stunning banners:
@Static121 has also built an amazing doc to help non-designers create new banners for blogs, content and social media needs. Take a look round this new asset here - and we’ll be pushing non-designers to use such tools like this to scale the investment in our designers and the CDWG.
I’m personally very happy to see one of these first ‘scaling’ tactics go live.
D. More killer videos:
It feels like some of the Dowls have real form now promoting the Coop and our products by video. Here’s one from @EarthMaze.
I cannot embed videos in Forum posts 
E. CDWG survey:
Having existed for a few months, we thought it was time to survey our designers to see how CDWG is generally working and what the top areas to improve are.
Step forward new contributor to the CDWG, @pujimak_in, who has been busy in the WG for the last half of July and created this excellent survey and write up.
While the overall feedback from designers was positive, we learned a number of interesting things, which we’re seeking to optimize. I would cite the top three items for potential optimization as:
- Communicating and scaling with other WGs and the DAO generally: we are thinking about this now. More to come in the next update.
- Having better onboarding docs: we’ve started a landing page to close this gap here (kudos to @pujimak_in for this v1), which will be getting built out quite a bit further in August (and probably a little here and there, over the long-term too).
- Ensuring consistent, scaling use of design assets: we’re going to invest more time to ensure the right design assets are being used around the DAO as well as in offsite locations such as CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap
Focus, best serving the DAO and ‘co-financing’:
Beyond progress against our goals, it’s important to talk about focus and how we can continue to serve the DAO best.
1. Focus: it’s worth giving a quick, if crude, future view of CDWG’s priorities during CDWG II (til 30th September) as the new website project consumes a lot less of our designers’ time:
- ~20-25%: optimize the new website’s design platform, adding 3D Cooper to it, and general polishing and finessing. We’re trying to upgrade our house, and owned web properties, from good to great. We can also use Cooper in docs, such as decks and PDFs too.
- ~50%: rich media and video content, driving loads of social and general web impressions, as we continue to build awareness. We aim to act as a key partner to LemonadeAlpha’s GWG here.
- ~25-30%: general requests from the DAO, which includes ads, guides, PDFs, etc. This are of our work we will be seeking to scale value add in, creating more assets like @Static121’s Canva resource mentioned above
2. Financing and ‘co-financing’: in the first month of CDWG II we’ve hit the $30k maximum contributor allocation for designers and contributors. This is a good thing - we have lots of really valuable people! - but it also means we need to think about i) how to focus on what CDWG thinks is the highest impact design work, while also ii) ensuring our designers get fairly rewarded.
So going forwards, to help with i and ii, CDWG will pilot implementing a model of ‘co-financing’ with other WGs for work which is important to the other WG but potentially a bit less important to CDWG’s goals. Example: a request to design a deck for a WG: this is valuable work, but given we a) already designed a template deck for people to use (other WGs and their contributors should be able to self-serve much of this type of work now) and b) are trying to focus Dowls’ time on things like videos for social media (which can achieve hundreds of thousands of impressions) such requests feel like fair game to say to a partner WG: “Hey, we’re happy to help but would like to discuss a co-financing arrangement, where you pay ⅔ of the designer’s rewards and CDWG pays ⅓.” The result we’re aiming for here is our Dowls being able to do more work than the CDWG budget along enables alone, by co-financing some work with other WGs.
Kudos to @Pepperoni_Joe for sparking a useful conversation on this topic and sharing this co-financing idea. It will be interesting to see how this works as an organizational concept.
We welcome your feedback, ideas and collaboration,
Dev and CDWG
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