What is your role at Sushi and can you fill us in on some of your daily tasks?
I am the Lead Visual Designer at Sushi and have been a part of the team pretty much since day one with UI Lead, Chester LaCroix.
My tasks are mostly focused on visual branding, illustrations, 3D renders, NFTs, and, all in all, taking responsibility in ensuring that the Sushi brand looks and feels dope! I also have a large hand in working with some of our industry partners, like MetaFactory, for example.
In the early days, I was the main driving force for how Sushi looked and created much of the visuals you see now. That being said, I can’t take all the credit, with Chester playing a major role in the Sushi brand we see today and Cabbage coming on board soon after, the visual style has been expanded in ways I couldn’t imagine.
In terms of the Sushi branding, what was your inspiration for Sushi’s main logo? Anything specific?
Mostly trial and error, I tried to make it more simplistic and not too busy for it to translate better to a wide variety of mediums and sizes. Other than that, I find it kind of hard to word how I design these things. I sort of just go with the flow and put things together. With enough trial and error, I finally get to that one asset where I think: “Wow, this might not suck” and go from there!
The color scheme you went ahead with is more on the cold side with all the purple and blue. Was there any reason behind choosing those colors?
We decided on these back when we didn’t really have the visual branding set up, so it actually took a lot of time. We went through tons of concepts, pretty much trying out every color combination you can imagine.
After a ton of back and forth with Chester, we came to the pink, blue gradient we currently use for all our designs. There was a little pushback on the pink, however, but I think everyone is happy with it now.
It’s been said on Twitter once that a lot of the DeFi projects tend to gravitate towards the pinks for their branding. From a design perspective, any reason you think there is for that?
I don’t know, it’s a really nice color (haha)? I mean, blue is cool, but it’s quite clinical, right? It’s quite a cold color. Pink is potentially more vibrant, more: Punchy? Unfortunately, whenever something is a shade of pink people can start throwing bricks and say: “It’s Uniswap!” but I don’t think one platform can really own a color.
What’s more important to think about, is how each color is being used. My intention was to try and make something that looked interesting and vibrant. With DeFi, you can’t really go with colours that feel safe or traditional.
How did you first hear about Sushi and what was your personal history from first getting involved to becoming a core team member?
I joined the community just before the vampire attack, so yeah, I’m pretty OG haha. Back then, I just started talking to people in the Sushi community. It was not too long before I bumped into Chester, who had also only just joined.
Was not long until we both started sharing ideas and posting designs. We weren’t paid or anything, we were just throwing stuff into Discord, just trying to help out wherever we could or wherever we saw a need. Not long after that, we got brought on officially as part-time contributors and soon after that, we were brought into Core Team as lead designers, it still seems so crazy.
That all said, I almost didn’t even bother. After seeing all the amazing stuff being made by everyone I almost convinced myself I had no chance to match that sort of quality. But people like Chester convinced me to try anyway, I’ve been surprised by everyone’s praise ever since.
You told me a little bit of your background of what you were doing before Sushi and it was a wild story. Could you fill in our audience?
So before Sushi, I was a struggling game designer making ends meet by being a grocery store assistant. Quite the career jump, right? I think I was making, like, I don’t know, seven, maybe eight thousand dollars a year working at this tiny grocery store. Now I’m lead designer at one of the biggest defi platforms on the planet. Mind-blowing really.
I had dabbled with crypto here and there, but didn’t give it much thought for most of 2020. The moment I looked back into it was the exact moment that Sushi was taking off. I spent an entire week just cramming as much information as possible, learning what I could about the protocol. When I think about it, if I came back to the industry a week later, I probably would have missed all of this.
What is your reaction or your response to people on Twitter who call you one of the top graphics designers in the DeFi space?
It’s strange, but I mean, I appreciate it. Like I’m so grateful, but ask any designer and they probably always say: They suck or they don’t deserve where they are currently. I can’t really put it into words. I keep having people DM me, asking if I’m open for contract work and I have to keep turning them down, it’s crazy. It really makes me think: “Where were you, like a year ago?”
You mentioned that when you were brainstorming for the Sushi logo you saw a lot of images floating around on Google that had a little face on the sushi, like a character. You’ve hinted to me that you’re working on a Sushi character. Could you elaborate on that a tiny bit?
Maybe it’s just me being stubborn, but I feel that just taking our Sushi illustrations and slapping a face on it is kind of low hanging fruit. That’s what comes up when you google search ‘sushi mascots,’ basically, all the results are sushi with faces, hands, legs, and so on.
I think it would be far more interesting to have magical cats as our Sushi spirit animal. It’s something I had in mind for ages, but was always unsure on how to propose it to everyone. I kept thinking it would be a really hard sell, but with the hype around animal tokens and internal talks about a potential Sushi “Meowshi” token, it was clear people really liked the idea of having cats as part of the Sushi brand.
The last logo-related question is: Which of Sushi’s product logos is your favourite and which, if any, would you like to update?
I think I have a soft spot for the main Sushi logo and I really love what Chester and Cabbage did with the neon signs on the app, particularly the SushiBar. In terms of updating, I do think that we have some logos that are a little mismatched. I do want to try and figure out how to unify all of them to a certain degree. The branding of MISO looks great, but can almost throw people off because it looks so different from everything else we’ve done. Hopefully, we can find a balance and get everything unified.
You’ve made a lot of 3D renders and illustrations for Sushi collaborations, ad campaigns, etc. Is there any that you’re particularly proud of or any that were particularly challenging?
The Doki DeGacha machine NFT collection was really challenging. I didn’t really have the hardware to go with the original idea, so it would have taken weeks of rendering. Although the final products turned out really nice. As for most proud, I really don’t know, I think the Pool Together Sushi renders I made were pretty good but I do have a soft spot for some of the older Sushi designs.
That said, I do hope to really improve my 3D design in the coming weeks and create some really amazing stuff for Sushi, perhaps even redo the landing page if time allows.
People may have noticed that your profile illustration has been updated. Can you let us know why you decided to update that and what’s the inspiration behind it?
I just wanted to get one that stood out a little bit and I guess the main reason was that the original really didn’t look like me in any way. I feel like having a character with a mask on allows me to live up to my profile picture a little bit more easily. My original profile illustration was this overly attractive anime boy, so I was thinking like: “How the hell can I live up to this when I show my real face to people? I don’t look anything like this!” But now with a mask, no one knows what I actually look like nor have any expectations, so when people do see my face it’s not filled with disappointment haha.
What is something about working at Sushi that other people like the audience wouldn’t know that they might find kind of shocking?
I don’t know what people wouldn’t know at this point. I mean, it’s completely unlike any other job I’ve had; It’s so adverse to normal. It’s not about having a university degree or years of credible experience in a professional career or whatever. You just come in, show that you can fill an opening, and if you do it well, you’re brought in. I’ve never really worked in any other place in the crypto scene, so I don’t know how it matches up to anyone else, but, I mean, I’m loving it so far.
We have this pretty amazing flat hierarchy, right? It’s like, sure, we got Maki and Joe who could fire us potentially haha. But it never feels like that kind of line of command, if that makes sense. For example, I’ve had jobs where people would have this air of unearned superiority and would be so crap to deal with because of their positions, but at Sushi, everyone’s equal. No need for making demands because everyone sees eye to eye and has skin in the game. We do everything we can to help one another as best as possible no matter what position you have.
If you could choose the place anywhere around the world, where the whole Sushi team could meet for vacation, where would it be and why?
I would like to go to Japan, but truth be told, I’ve always been too poor to travel abroad before, so anywhere would be an improvement haha.
What do you do for fun outside of Sushi?
What do I do for fun? It’s really boring I guess since I just play video games but I am looking to learn how to ride a motorbike, the idea of travelling around the world on a bike sounds cool.
Other than that I would like to get back into making video games again.
What video games were you designing before you joined Sushi?
Anything really, but I really struggled with finishing them off. I kept trying to make everything perfect and that would end up killing more projects than not.
I did finish Neo Neo though. I have a love-hate relationship with it, but people keep telling me it’s really good. For anyone that wants to know, it was a blend between Hotline Miami and Super Hexagon. It sold pretty poorly haha.
What is your favourite sushi?
Um, I’ve I haven’t really had any good sushi. I’ve just had, like, really crappy sushi from corner shops, which is only just borderline fresh. I guess when we meet up I want to have real sushi.
Keep on the look out for more weekly Sushi core team interviews!
Sushi is building a comprehensive DeFi ecosystem with AMM, leverage & margin trading platform, token launchpad and NFT artist platform. Follow our socials to keep up with our product launches and find out more on how you can make the most of your cryptocurrency assets with Sushi’s secure and powerful DeFi tools!
Exchange | Kashi | Docs | Discord | Twitter | Telegram | YouTube | Tutorial | Github
