The DWeb visual world is built on three pillars:
↳ Personality, which defined the design direction,
↳ Legacy, which gave us the core components of the visual language,
↳ Scale, which keeps us from designing something ultra-finished or from choosing too narrow a style.

Our vision has always been to create a brand that echoes in the hearts and minds of everyone who is already active in our network and those considering joining it.

The brand personality workshop with the DWeb leaders and most of the active community members revealed that in order to stay true in the years to come, the brand should reflect the following attributes:

Another requirement was to honor the legacy and the original spirit of the Internet’s creation. In other words, the DWeb brand identity should be anchored and not simply be created out of thin air.

Therefore, I knew that when translating a set of traits and values into a brand moodboard, I needed to suggest a visual atmosphere that would feel familiar and yet different at the same time, one that would resonate with Internet pioneers but also be adopted by the zero-generation. In other words, it should be flexible enough to withstand experimentation.

The greatest challenge was to step aside from overused “blockchain” graphics, even though these are still the most popular, most shared and the first to be associated with DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology).

I was inspired to take a closer look at the dotted grids and the concept of variable “breathing” patterns by mottos such as “everyone can make an impact”, “connecting people and protocols” and “global movement”.

Our aim is to make the logo as dynamic as possible and make it evolve in parallel with growing brand awareness.

In the stage of brand launch and identity introduction we enabled the dynamics of the logo by turning it into a container with only one variable - the dot color or style. In the future we envision one more variable - the size of the dot - that will allow the logo to breathe & its heart to beat.

Finally, the logo should eventually become a fully customizable asset serving as a tool for expressing the diverse identities of people within our community.

We needed to answer questions like:

1. When the movement comes to involve more people how can we ensure that the brand design doesn’t exclude anyone? 
2. How can we ensure that the brand echoes in the hearts and minds of everyone who is already active in our network and those considering joining it?

To achieve agreeable solutions we have made sure everything is open and customizable, putting it all together in a Lego-set-alike visual language:

From the very beginning it was clear that the website should be a community hub - an entry point where you can find all ideas, concepts and resources critical to moving the Decentralized Web forward.

To achieve not just an overriding vision but also just the right amount of detail, we invited attendees to take part in a UX workshop when DWeb Camp 2019 was at its peak. Within 4 hours we had mapped the website’s visitor needs via user stories - a tool very simple and one so familiar to developers.

Later on, when turning insights into user flows, I introduced the team to the “website as city, website as building” concept (more about it in the upcoming article), which we took as the main approach to the website’s architecture.