Bounties Network Community Profile: Ali & Nooshin aka Joy Design

A redesign for life: How young designers are raising the bar for web3 work and switching to crypto freelance

Simona Pop
Bounties Network
5 min readOct 3, 2019

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Nooshin’s self portrait submitted to our Faces of Ethereum bounty

“Blockchain is a window to a world where work is done differently. It’s a chance for a world without borders, a world that opens up more opportunities for people to live easier and have more control over their lives.”

Let’s get to know you — tell us a little bit about yourselves.

My wife and I started this design partnership almost seven years ago as two young designers and eventually picked the name “Joy” for it.

We are both in our late 20s. I’m a 3D Generalist with nine years of experience working on many different projects from games, to animation, to product modelling, and have almost always worked as a freelancer. Because of my love for tech, I took a different path in my academic studies though, so right now I’m working on my master degree in IT.

My beloved Nooshin is a passionate graphic designer. She has an associate degree in graphic design and worked on many different design projects from logo to poster designs. She also works as a freelancer. Right now, she is getting a bachelor degree in English literature. Oh yeah, she’s is a bookworm too!

We both knew we want to keep learning and do more than a regular office job. A couple of months into our relationship, we started thinking about working together as a team. Our enthusiasm for learning and discovering more about art and design became the solid base our team was built on.

It started simple: sharing ideas and doing simple tasks for each other, but after a while, we became a team. I started to do more graphic design work alongside my 3D work. Nooshin is the idea machine for the team and I’m often the software nerd who is transferring her ideas into digital designs.

Ali’s self portrait submitted to our Faces of Ethereum bounty

What interests you about blockchain and why?

It started a few years ago. The idea of Bitcoin was so fascinating to us. As ICOs and new blockchains like Ethereum emerged, it became clear to us that blockchain was going to be a part of the future of technology and have an impact on everyday life. During my Masters degree, I studied blockchain in one of my classes, and as we learnt more about it, we knew we wanted to play a bigger part in its evolution.

We started by turning our savings into cryptocurrency and trading tokens on different exchange websites. Unfortunately, when we were trading on Bittrex, back in 2017, they disabled our accounts because of our nationalities and seized all of our savings. Something we felt was completely against the purpose and essence of blockchain.

It was most of the money we had saved to start our life together and suddenly it was all gone. This was a big set back but we never gave up on blockchain. We started again, from scratch, and more than two years have passed since then. As we continued exploring, we went from simply trading to finding websites like the Bounties Network. It helped us expand our work while following our passion for design and crypto.

How would you define blockchain in simple terms so anyone could understand it?

Blockchain is a window to a world where work is done differently. It’s a chance for a world without borders, a world that opens up more opportunities for people to live easier and have more control over their lives.

Just look at how Bitcoin has made it easier to move money between two people across the world. Or how Ethereum makes it possible for new innovative applications to grow. More and more companies, and eventually governments, will move toward using blockchains and it will benefit everyone everywhere.

How did you find the Bounties Network and how are you using bounties?

As we became more interested in blockchain, we wanted to shift our work towards the blockchain industry. The possibility of the world opening up to us and the chance to work with many groups of innovative people seemed like a very good opportunity. In our quest to achieve this goal, we came to know the Bounties Network. It’s such a great use of blockchain for freelancers who want to get involved in working to build this new world.

The Bounties Network makes a real difference by bringing different people from different parts of the world to work on problems, whether it’s a simple survey, a logo design or something really big like helping keep the oceans clean. Through Bounties Network we have already worked with so many nice people and have had the chance to really expand our work within the blockchain community.

Joy Design won the ETHBoston design contest bounty

Do you have any ideas on how bounties (or blockchain in general) could be applied to help more people?

We think right now, blockchain is on the right path. There are some very smart people out there in the crypto community who will make sure it becomes mainstream.

The foundation of blockchain will provide a great place for the best ideas to grow. And we feel Bounties Network is one of them. I think right now the most important thing is to help the Bounties Network (and other blockchain good use cases) get seen by more and more people, especially in the freelance communities!

Winning submission for the ETHNY design contest bounty

What would you like to work on/get involved with/create in the future?

We are really interested in working with people with new ideas. We have always worked as freelancers but are open to being a part of a team that has big, bright ideas. We think the blockchain space is a great place to have an effect on the future and we want to be a part of it!

Everyone Deserves a Piece — ETHNY Logo

Anything else you want to add for everyone reading?

We want to thank the Bounties Network and everyone who has worked with us on the different design bounties. It’s a great platform and we want to see it grow even faster!

My heartfelt thanks to Ali, Nooshin and everyone involved with creating and fulfilling bounties. You are all active agents of the change we want to see in the world.

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Simona Pop
Bounties Network

Head of Community @ethstatus | Co-founder @ethbounties, creative & speaker. Omelette eater.