DEV Protocol

Product, branding

2022

Dev Protocol's mission is to empower all creators for sustainable challenges. Decentralized funding, Social tokens, DAOs, and everything they might need for a sustainable creator economy. It's the core of a decentralized creator economy. Started by Japanese enthusiasts and proudly developed by the worldwide open-source community. My role was to redesign identity, reconsider UX flow and create a new look and feel for solutions offered and upcoming projects.

Identity

The DEV Protocol team was such an opened-minded client that we developed and apply dynamic logo design. I developed a set of identical logo brand marks that could be generated with a simple script. The logo has an 8x8 grid system, divided into two parts: text and brandmark areas. Whyte Inktrap font used has a silhouette of a block in 'V' and 'R' letters to accomplish blockchain technology. The logo was developed in short and full versions and could be scaled for any new company product.

Idea

The new idea is based on the gradient element of the previous logo. The four colors of it represented idea, team, product, and community. Each color has a different portion of the gradient surface as a metaphor for moving from a small idea to a larger community.

The new set of colors has been recreated from the gradient. There are 15 blocks used in the logo, the number of blocks was inspired by the Merkle Tree hash structure (1,2,4,8...). The blocks are combined in a chain as a reference to blockchain technology. The logo turned out to be geeky, as an open-source community logo should be.

DEV Coin

Based on the chain idea of a logo I created the DEV coin design. It's a 'D' letterform written with a chain brandmark.

Swag

Fan swag was designed to be spread among the DEV community and to be used as giveaways during meet-ups, events, and conferences. I tried to keep it minimal with some eastern design style accent, as a reference to the Japanese origin of the company.

Stakes.Social

Stakes.Social is the DEV protocol team's subproject that allows it to stack in Open Source Projects to get extra rewards, track liquidity or submit its own project. The key goals were to design an OS projects library with a detailed overview of each project and a clear staking flow. We decided to keep the original brand mark beloved by the community, but colors and typography have been updated to fit the umbrella brand's visual direction. We found a nice visual trick to improve interaction by randomizing hover colors. Together with DEV Community and the core team we've reconsidered, improved and simplified the staking flow focusing on crypto newbies.

Incubator

One more sub-project — Incubator, was created as the core team initiative to onboard new projects. Incubator has an educative mission for those contributors from one side and plays the role of a showcase of 'staff pic' projects for the community.

The idea of the logo was to combine the image of the letter 'i', with a chart, as a method of growing rewards and to use a rounded shape background plate as a symbol of care. The logo was made in the umbrella brand colors and typography.

I developed a nice 3D animation for the landing page and a nice solution to go with vertical gradient background for project thumbnails.

AirDrop

DEV AirDrop was another marketing activity initiated by DEV Protocol to enlarge the supporting the community. A simple landing page uses the animated 3D animation of restyled Anywhere Door that invites a user to a new world of OSS economics. Dev Airdrop was designed as a sub-identity of the original DEV Protocol logo, using the same visual structure and one of the brand colors.

Graphics

For social media and marketing activities I developed a number of nice 3D illustrations. Some of them were later performed as NFT-licenced images to spread across the DEV Protocol community.

Learning and Findings

Various partners like Microsoft for Startups, algorithm libraries on GitHub, and Code for Japan expressed, that they would join as partners to help further the initiative. The project design ideas and findings were highly appreciated by DEV Community and Web3 professionals, treated as well thought out.

Aggre

Dev Protocol was adapted to the market from a solution to tokenize OSS and has since grown into a middleware protocol that supports many cultural assets and DAOs. Therefore, we needed a technical, clean, and more challenging brand than contemporary one.

Stas kept the good essentials of our existing design resources and sublimated them into a wholly new concept, completely rebranding us. They are so lovely, solid and unique, and he provided us with an unparalleled sense of design. He also designed the information architecture from scratch and quickly turned them into a fully functioning website design. There is no doubt that he has a solid and unique skill set. I trust that his designs will always bring a lot of value to users. I would love to work with him again.

Dev Protocol
CTO and co-founder