Hey y’all,
It’s a month into the life of the Creative and Design Working Group (CDWG) - so an update.
Here’s a reminder of the problem’s we aimed to address and the goals we sought to aim for in the first three months - via the founding post:
What is the core problem(s) you want to solve?
- The creative and design process is fragmented, not centralized into a specific function in the Coop
- This makes it:
- Inefficient, less coordinated
- Harder for non-designers to submit briefs in an easy-to-understand and keep-in-touch-with way
- Less clear for non-designers what the designers are working on, timelines and competing demands for design resources
- More difficult for designers to manage requests and interact with wider DAO
- Harder to attract and onboard new designers to the Coop, who currently cannot engage with an understandable department, leader, working tools, rewards structure, etc
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 in May - after one month
Focusing on the specific goals for now (we’ll talk general goals after a longer time period of three months) it feels like we’re either hitting or on course to hit our goals.
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Website: more detailed update below, but @mestigoit has led the design of the brand framework, which then equipped him with a colour palette and framework to design the new website homepage and start design on other related pages (DPI product, About Us, trading page).
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Recruitment: we aimed to double headcount from three to six Designer Owls (Dowls) over three months, but we’ve been fortunate to do this and more in one month. Some of this comes from the MVI crew’s outreach (thanks @DarkForestCapital @verto0912 verto who first had contact with @caf and @Static121), some comes from organic means and attentive onboarding. We now have six graphic and creative type designers and one product designer - a nice mix. We also have a very experienced crypto and financial services product designer onboarding right now - to hopefully drop a strategy doc of ideas shortly and swell headcount to eight. This is an enviable amount of design resources for the Coop.
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Location to submit design requests and engage with designers: we have set up a design request form here which anyone can use to seek design help, which feeds into our CDWG tracker here, Dowls DM requesters for more info and updates and, finally, the #Design Discord channel is a supporting location for delivery (if assets are not DM’d too).
From our view it looks like this tooling and process is working well - requests are picked up quickly and executed in days, generally - and we’ve received good feedback. But we’d love to hear more and any negative feedback from people (CDWG and non-CDWG members). Please keep feedback flowing.
Design highlights for May
Excludes website assets below; major assets and initiatives are showcased; you will see many other fantastic assets and work around the Coop ecosystem too not mentioned here but in potential future updates.
- Brand framework designed and finalized by @mestigoit. Full Figma doc here, TLDR version here (and screenshots below). As you can see, base colours of blacks and whites form the core, with a range of colours adding the accents - and different colours or backings being used for banners or social media backgrounds.
The brand framework is in a state of strong completeness now, though we expect to add some 3D icons and images soon. Such documents always get a little update here and there after the initial intensive build.
- Instagram strategy realized by @caf and @Static121 . Strategy doc here (including wider strategy ideas), results rolling out here (and screenshots below)
As you can see, the brand framework colours are being deployed, the design work is really nice, the content is educational top-of-funnel and follower numbers are growing well (from zero at start).
- A range of videos, including this BTC2x-FLI promo from earth_maze and this BTC2x-FLI launch video from @codemathics (the later produced in rapid time for a very short deadline).
We expect to firm up rich media and video strategy overall this next month, identify gaps and prioritize production resources for the next one to two months. This type of content has huge reach online and will be useful to @LemonadeAlpha’s GWG as content - we’ll keep tight on this.
Fuller website update
@mestigoit has continued to build on his brand framework building blocks and early wireframes to design a potential homepage. Full Figma file can be found here (view in red box), light and black for desktop and mobile .png files here (I also post some screenshots below but check the G Drive link immediately before for a better view - the files aren’t rendering as hoped in this Forum app).
Martin’s work aims to respect the brand survey results here and our CDWG goals of designing a minimal, sophisticated, trustable yet fun site which would effectively serve visitors from the crypto and tradfi communities. More page designs will be shared in the next update - and watch for a related poll!
Please share your feedback on these homepage designs! We want to use this moment to get non-CDWG peoples’ opinions, bake them in, then move forwards.
We are now working to plan and complete the fuller design process and website build process. More details on that next month, but the good news in the short-term is that thanks to @Dylan and @DefiJesus we have laid webflow infrastructure, continue to evolve the release plan and have more access to engineering resources.
We welcome your feedback, ideas and collaboration.
Dev and the CDWG.
PS: Reminder: you can submit design requests here and say hi in the #Design channel here. We have a large, multi-function Design Team now - come load us up!
Love the homepage.
) but wondered how we best communicate and make available all the relevant assets?