CDWG May Update & new website homepage

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.

  1. 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).

  2. 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.

  3. 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).

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!

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These are :fire: Love the homepage.

As I understand it we’re also getting a mullet (bifurcating), right? Business up front, dApp in the back? Did we decide against that? If not, any design notes/plans on the dApp end of things?

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We’re getting a marketing site and an app site @0xModene - yes.

More designs to come soon on product pages and the wider app!

Glad you like the homepage designs so far. I like the dark one best :slight_smile:

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+1 for the dark homepage design. The white is clean and looks good too, but I really like the black / charcoal alternating panels, and the green pops on the black.

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Thanks for your thoughts and +1 vote @prairiefi !

+1 on dark because it doesn’t destroy my eyeballs late at night, but both look great

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Love the work you are all doing. Look forward to the new site, it looks great!

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Thanks @mrvls_brkfst !

These look awesome! I love the overall color choices, brand feel, and that you’ve given users the option to toggle between light and dark modes in the top right corner (if I’m reading correctly). Will that option + the nav remain sticky to the top of the page as the user scrolls?

Would be super cool if there are some micro animations included – like the ticker-style numbers on https://compound.finance/ !

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Thanks for the update @0x_Dev and team! It’s been great to see this side of the Coop get up and running really quick these last two months, and we have some real talent in the team which is reflected in the quality of our outward facing content now.

One question for yourself and @mestigoit is now the brand framework is pretty much complete, what are the steps to ensure everyone is aware and using the correct colours/fonts/formats? I’m doing my part by starting to use IBM plex everywhere (:innocent:) but wondered how we best communicate and make available all the relevant assets?

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Thanks for the comment @catjam !

Some nav on desktop will persist with scroll but most will not. Mobile is persistent burger menu obviously.

Funny you say that re micro animations: while we haven’t thought of that specifically, we are looking at 3D Cooper (our Owl) and iconography to add more character. Perhaps other ways than micro animations of adding character. We’ll chat this through in CDWG and will generally be looking to add more ambitious elements to the web design after launching this new base.

Hey @DarkForestCapital,

Thanks for the comment and the question about communicating the brand framework effectively is a good one. I’m @'ing @Pepperoni_Joe here to discuss with him in Discord, because he’s so tuned in in the Org and New Joiners stuff.

It feels like we should communicate the brand framework and asset library of template files (G Docs, G Slides, etc), maybe also with a simple explainer/guide, in the new, top-notch onboarding experience and mention it in the updated GitBook, as prominent, high flow areas. We could also pin a comment in #Design (though that will have less reach).

I’ll come back to you on this.

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Very cool!

Lobbing some homepage design feedback/questions over the fence:

  1. Great to hear that we’re using Webflow; enabling non-eng. to make quick changes is fantastic
  2. What is the thinking behind since a big homepage? I notice that Yearn, Aave, Compound, and many others have comparatively simple homepages. This is coming from a place of curiosity about the strategy more than anything
  3. Why are # of twitter followers & # discord members important enough to include on the homepage?
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Cool!! Thanks for the response. Definitely pro microanimations :slight_smile:

Another simple way to add character is with font choices. The chosen font is great for readability in body text and longer-form copy, but maybe you could mix it up a bit by choosing a different header font?

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@anon10525910 thanks for the comments and questions.

  • Homepage: short vs long scroll is a big debate in design. Some crypto projects do have shorter ones, you’re right, some crypto projects and many more tradfi-ish things have longer scroll (E.g. Bitwise, UMA). We’ve gone with this initially, reflecting the brand survey Martin did and trying to balance all the core values. We also think there’s a lot to communicate and as long as the long scroll works well on mobile (>50% of traffic) we’re serving browsers well. That said, this is a community, if there’s strong feedback to short homepage, we’ll listen to that - we can also try iterations in time too, if data/sentiment drives change.

  • Social proof to include in homepage: another good qu. We’re trying to credentialize as much as we can here and thought these proof points were valuable, below higher order stats such as AuM/TVL. But, if some of these social proof points are try hard or come off as desperate, we want to hear the feedback. You feel they are? Personally, I think our following on Twitter is not only a powerful asset but a strong proof point too - AuM/TVL and addresses are the most powerful proof points in my mind though - if if we reflect this hierarchy in this page, it works. I.e. - don’t put Twitter follower No above the fold! :slight_smile:

Cheers.

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Hey! @0x_Dev I’ve reached out via discord but love to help with on-going feedback and user testing for the designs here.

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Regarding the twitter followers, I see this very close to you Greg, it won’t convince me if i see 10,000 or 20,000 follower. it is the same with TVL and other financial metrics these are dead numbers. And I couldnt imagine what i can do with 1m dollar and what i can do with 100m dollar. We have to find good comparisons.
I am always fighting for this idea to get rid of ‘just numbers’ in any way, we have to tell stories. :slight_smile:

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One of the public transport systems here in Berlin (BVG) tries to explain 1,5m of distance mean. Maybe for some it’s hard to even imagine what a meter is like. So they make up the comparison.
So they try to see it from a funny perspective, not only for COVID related thing. It is one of the general ways the try to address things. And they have one of the best social media campaign world wide.

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It’s in case Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II happens to be travelling through Berlin. She’ll immediately know what to do and no doubt feel very welcome too.

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Good stuff… especially on the main brand page. Looking forward for this.

Though I’m just curious on whether there is a plan for a multi-language blog (as a subdomain) in the works? Personally i feel theres a need for a central depository for all our articles that we fully own the content of it (i’m aware in Medium, we don’t actually own it; i may be wrong).

Having a ML Blog as a subdomain, would make it easier for other lang contributors to assist in translating articles; while also driving website traffic to IC website. And I’m thinking the set up is relatively easy as we could use WP and copy the design language from the main site.

Just a thought… would welcome feedback on this.

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