DXdao.eth receives a fresh coat of paint
DXdao visually overhauls its decentralized, ENS hosted landing page
Since its inception, DXdao has utilized the same landing page: a simple white page with plain text information. Of course, this was functional, but as the community progressed and more products were released, it became clear that DXdao deserved more.
Now, after months of back and forth in the community, DXdao governance has approved a new update to its website at DXdao.eth, which you can access now — check it out!
The process of finding consensus on a new landing page was a learning experience for the DXdao community and lays the groundwork for new landing pages for all of its products. Read on to learn more about these processes, and the future of DXdao’s landing pages.
How did we get here?
The initial inklings of a landing page refresh came up in early February of 2021, when Argentinian boutique design studio Entrecasa reached out through DXdao’s DAOtalk forum. This proposal outlined not only a landing page refresh, but some brand exploration and guidelines. After some initial deliberation, a proposal was set forth by the design studio to begin work on “Option B”, including a revision of the DXdao brand with an accompanying landing page, which passed in March.
A number of factors influenced the final result and duration of engagement, the most important of which was the brand exploration. Entrecasa began working with us at the start of the engagement to design a “mood board.” Mood boards, for the uninitiated, are collections of images that communicate a specific emotion to the designer and are used to maintain consistency throughout the creative process. You can find the initial “mood board” here, or a snippet below.
Once both sides were happy with the atmosphere, Entrecasa began brainstorming several options DXdao might take with its brand and typeface. Entrecasa generated a variety of graphic presentations surrounding viable brands quickly and efficiently, which led us to the most difficult part of the process.
It’s quite difficult to reach off-chain consensus, especially when it comes to branding and design. The process was first fine-tuned by individuals who worked closely with Entrecasa before being rolled out to the rest of the DAO, where problems arose and processes began to fall out of place. Since this was made open to the bulk of active contributors, there had been a great deal of divergent viewpoints among the numerous voices, causing the effort to become tangled in its own web. Both teams went through processes to find the perfect DXdao brand that would satisfy all contributors equally; a brand that, in hindsight, may not exist.
You can find a handful of the approaches below. When the idea of DXdao branding is revisited and the community gets involved, it’s possible that one of these explorations will be built upon or utilized in the future.
Lessons Learned
Both parties eventually agreed that using DXdao’s current brand guidelines to produce a refresh to the landing page as it was at the time would be the best option. For DXdao, a potential brand update is still on the table, and contributors are interested in revisiting it in the near future using the following lessons:
- Aggregating communication through an individual, rather than the whole DAO — The variety of perspectives surrounding Entrecasa’s work and actionable items was apparent, and it was clear that they were overwhelmed. To minimize further contradicting statements, a consensus should be formed prior to any engagement and directed through an individual.
- Skip the internal steps, involve the community — Although the rationale was reasonable at the time, the brand revision process should not have been halted internally, and the community should have been given opportunities to participate and express their thoughts throughout the process.
- Better unification of vision — Related to learning #1, this process should have been much more clear with both DXdao contributors and the community at large. The vision should have been discussed wider from the get-go. Alternatively, if unification of dozens of opinions is deemed improbable, a hypothetical proposal could be created that delegates branding related decision making power to a contributor capable of making the best choice on behalf of DXdao.
The process moved much quicker once utilizing current brand guidelines was cemented, resulting in the page being delivered in mid October. After contributors ran over the page and made some changes and additions, we moved to the final step: DXdao’s decentralized governance process.
The Governance Process and ENS Ownership
If you haven’t had an opportunity to read “Why Does DXdao Use ENS and Why Is It Powerful?”, stop what you are doing right now. The article covers DXdao’s ownership of its ENS domains and ability to control product front-ends as a DAO. This should give a deeper understanding of the simplified process that is about to be described.
Since DXdao utilizes ENS, reproducible hashes are required to be served to users. Once several community members confirmed that the IPFS hash was reproducible, a proposal containing an update to the DXdao.eth ENS was submitted, boosted, and voted on. Upon proposal passage and execution, the content hash is changed on-chain to point users to a hash of the updated landing page. The benefit to this process is that only the DAO can control the DXdao.eth domain in a decentralized fashion. Provided you trust the DAO, you’ll never have to worry about the domain being attacked or utilized with malicious intent.
Looking to the Future
The DXdao landing page refresh is only the beginning of the “Landing Page Effort”. The products in DXdao’s suite are going to require their own landing pages as they begin to roll-out. There may even be products that are yet to see the light of day that require a special touch.
Can you identify the two DXdao protocols below?
About DXdao: DXdao is a decentralized collective that builds and governs DeFi products. DXdao was spawned in May 2019 through a collaboration between Gnosis and DAOstack. Reputation (REP) is voting power in DXdao, and DXD is the financial token with a claim on profit from DXdao products.
DXdao products include Omen (prediction markets), Mesa (batch auction DEX), and Swapr (governance-enabled AMM). DXdao believes in governance and decentralization.
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