CDWG June Update

Another month has flown by in the nest, so time for an update from CDWG. This has been our second month officially as a WG.

Quick reminder of our goals:

General

  • Improve perception of the Coop’s design execution:
    • Internal: qualitative feedback signals from community members that our design and marketing assets have ‘significantly stepped up’. Could be via a poll and/or comments from community members and key stakeholders such as Biz Dev, Sales, GWG, etc. We can take a regular pulse on this
    • Externally: harder to gauge without a significant project we lack resources for now, but internal feedback signals above at scale should be directionally significant and correlated with external opinions

Specific

  • If the update website project is greenlit (more info in future post)
    • Publish updated planning docs and trackers (largely built)
    • Design Figma files for new website (gating function, to earn greenlight from community and large stakeholders if design execution is highly rated)
    • Assist in planning resourcing, build, testing and release
  • Attract 100% more people to the group in the first iteration of CDWG: double head count from three to six
  • Have clearly understood locations for community members to:
    • Submit design requests and track them through delivery
    • Find assets and files of any kind

Progress against specific goals in June: (appraisal against general goals to be made at a future date)

  1. Website design & build project:
    @mestigoit designed and advanced the product pages (DPI, MVI, etc), the About Us page, Methodologists page, Institutions page (v2) and 404 page. View designs here. Martin is now designing and advancing the app site, before a post is made to the forum regarding website designs and seeking a vote FOR/AGAINST building them
    @Emil_ETH and @Gekonn then began work test building in Webflow. This is early stage testing and learning
    – I’ve started working with @Dylan to plan technical side of the website build and release timeline. @DefiJesus is now tech liaison to CDWG for this project, which is exciting.

  2. Attracted more designers: we met our goal of attracting six designers last month and now have eight designers in CDWG. We have so much talent now, we will seek to achieve a small budget increase for CDWG II (post coming soon).

  3. Locations to a) make design requests via and b) find design assets and resources: part a) was solved last month - design request form lives here. Part b) has now been fully solved too (it was partially solved last month, but not optimized), thanks to help from @Gekonn and @Static121. These guys have built this Design Archive which links out to a myriad of Drive sub-folders. Please find Coop design assets for your needs there - and let us know your feedback on the experience! We will be spreading news of this new resource in meeting decks and Discord channels.

Other design highlights in June to check out:

  • New branding has been rolled out across Google Slides decks by @mestigoit and @Gekonn. You can find examples to follow for your decks and WG here, as well as being used for the Weekly Call and other group calls now. Please make copies of these Slides files, then update your copy version, to not mess up others’ work. We will also be spreading news of this new resource in meeting decks and Discord channels.

Important note:
– The brand framework was carefully created by @mestigoit after polling our community
– If you read more about the polling, you see the brand framework has been created to get the right balance between our values, philosophy and ambition - a tricky balance to visually execute
– As such, rolling it out consistently across our decks and internal and external documents is important - otherwise we will look uncoordinated and unprofessional: if you need help in applying the new branding to your materials, or have questions about the branding in general, jump to our Discord #Design channel

  • An awesome introduction to Index Coop video has been created by Jason (@earth_maze in Discord) , with input and feedback from a range of other Coop members
  • Synthetix Mirror Index (SMI) logo design process (click and scroll to see ideas and designs from many Design Owls (Dowls)) is underway
  • 3D Cooper research by @earth2travis, now being picked up by @codemathics (more info to come soon!)
  • New business cards designed by @codemathics
  • An “I want you!” Uncle Sam owl was designed for the Methodologists’ web page by @caf and @Static121. Inserted below:

Rewards:

Monthly rewards have been documented here and will be paid to contributors via the Funding Counsel once a rewards merkel tree is deployed.

We welcome your feedback, ideas and collaboration.

Dev and CDWG

PS: reminder:

  • Submit your design requests here
  • Find design assets and resources here
  • Find the newly branded Google Slide template here
  • Say hi in the #Design Discord channel here
6 Likes

Thanks @0x_Dev for the update - I love what the team is achieving and very much looking forward to the new site!

Cool to see @dylan and @DefiJesus are working on the technical side of the site! I want to pass on, and echo, the desire from contributors for multi-lingual functionality - at least for the blog. Especially with regards to Asia, we are being told that customers and investors will only trust the official site for information. @Tudou has impressed on me how important this is. I know it has been discussed before, so this is just a friendly bump. Great report from a great team!

P.S. the link for the values, philosophy, and ambition is borked.

6 Likes

Hi @mrvls_brkfst

Thank you for this comment and the kind words.

  • Multi-language: this is a major focus for us too and we’re hoping to attack it in two parts. Launch site with tech to support multilanguage but with English first - simple way to launch faster. Then build out the major languages asap after we catch a few bugs in the initial launch and house keeping items. I’ll reach out and we can start a conversation and planning doc about this

  • Buggy link: fixed. Thank you for citing this.

:pray:t5:

3 Likes

Hey @DevOnDeFi

I’m bumping this conversation also;

As I’ve replied earlier here as a potential solution to the constraints. But there were no reply then.

As the same concern was raised by @Tudou in our APAC meeting yesterday.

Especially understanding the constraint; and I was thinking of easing the development by setting a subdomain as a Wordpress (which i gave a simple step by step; on what needs to be done on my reply)

Furthermore the recent audit made my Morgan (shared in Discord); I think its really important that we need to host all the articles in our own site; this is to build the SEO/SEM.

Personally I feel both of web dev and blog can run in parallel; if the blog is build on Wordpress. The only resources we need from your side; is setting up the subdomain and installation of Wordpress.

I hope to discuss further with you on this. And perhaps we can work something out. Looking forward to your reply. Thanks

Hey @pujimak_in ,

Thanks for the comment and bumping this.

The need for a more comprehensive website with blog and research section is a major project already underway between CDWG, EWG, GWG. We’re building designs for the marketing site in Webflow and currently deciding on a CMS: Ghost, Contentful or Strapi. One of the main requirements for the CMS is having an API and being able to integrate with Webflow and a localization app.

Morgan and I have been in regular dialogue too - I introduced him to the Coop and know him well. We all 100% want to be able to host and own our own content, for SEO and general conversion and data reasons.

I’m personally quite against WordPress, for a range of reasons we can discuss. Would you like to jump into the Discord and join the Design channel? Or, DM me in Discord via my handle: Dev.#2739 ?

Cheers

1 Like